University of Calgary Press
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CREATIVITY AND SCIENCE IN CONTEMPORARY
ARGENTINE LITERATURE: BETWEEN ROMANTICISM
AND FORMALISM
Joanna Page
ISBN 978-1-55238-770-2
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4 | Machines, Metaphors, and
Multiplicity: Creativity Beyond
the Individual
For David Porush, “cybernetic fictions” are most properly defined as those
taking technology and particularly cybernetics as their theme but that
also “focus on the machinery or technology of their fiction.”1 Recent critical
studies have begun to look beyond representations of science or the posthuman in literature to consider how scientific theories or cybernetics
may illuminate the workings of the text itself. Metafiction has become an
instance of complexity theory, and the act of reading a demonstration of the
relationship between noise and information in information theory. There
has been a move away from a focus on how literature might represent certain
scientific theories towards an understanding of how it manifests complex
structures, incompleteness, or emergence.2 Many texts by Piglia and
Cohen, exemplary of a highly reflexive literary tradition in Argentina, lend
themselves particularly well to this kind of approach. In exploring here their
use of certain metaphors drawn from mathematics and biology, my purpose
is to try to understand more accurately what it means to claim that their
fiction (or literature more broadly), in addition to representing machines, is
itself a machine: in other words, to find the point at which the “machine is
not a metaphor” (Deleuze and Guattari).3
161
The many machines and scientific models constructed in texts by Piglia
and Cohen allow them to explore ideas of creativity that are fully depersonalized. The tangled textual hierarchies of La ciudad ausente (1992) become
open systems, energized by constant flows across the boundaries of the text.
Mutation, variation, self-organization, and other biological metaphors are
marshalled to provide models for creativity and continual self-renewal in literature. Piglia draws on models of autopoiesis and open systems as a way of
thinking about the constant exchanges between the text and its environment
in which porous boundaries are paradoxically key to the text’s self-definition,
preservation, and propagation. Our approach to his work alters significantly
when we see the many intertextual references in his fiction, not as hidden
messages for the critic to decode, but as the deliberate foregrounding of a
method of narrative construction. Intertextuality and reflexivity do not mark
the apogee of postmodern narcissism but a manifestation of how meaning is
created through resonance and rhizomes. The theory of creativity suggested
by the writing machines in La ciudad ausente and Blanco nocturno (2010) is
in many ways a post-Romantic one. It replaces the individual artistic genius
with a thoroughly depersonalized art and reworks the old conflict between
organic and mechanistic visions of the world to reveal a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between human creativity and the machinic.
Exemplary of Cohen’s practice of “realismo inseguro” (unstable realism),
the stories of El fin de lo mismo (1992) are textual experiments with the kind
of provisional and unstable structures that characterize non-equilibrium
systems. They demonstrate the extent to which Cohen draws on dissipative
structures and theories of chaos and complexity, “no sólo […] como mito de
la época, sino como hipótesis de trabajo para las invenciones de la literatura”
(not only […] as a myth of our times, but as a working hypothesis for the
inventions of literature). 4 In this collection, entropy becomes a privileged
metaphor, firstly for the potential elimination of difference in a hyper-mediatized, market-governed society, but also, and more importantly, for literature’s role in staging an encounter with radical and irreducible difference.
Cohen’s use of the entropy metaphor therefore diverges significantly from its
apocalyptic deployment in the fiction of Ballard, Dick, Pynchon, or Michael
Moorcock. Instead, it becomes a way of thinking – alongside Nietzsche and
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Michel Serres – about multiplicity, and the creative power of disorder and
difference.
In Piglia’s unusual couplings of the organic and the machinic, together
with his interest in autopoiesis and open systems, we may detect resonances
of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the text as assemblage. Cohen’s
interest in dissipative systems and entropy as metaphors for the act of literary creation also draw on Deleuze’s understanding of the act of writing as
becoming-other or becoming-multiple. These frameworks, as I will show,
are of considerable use in probing the construction, in work by Piglia and
Cohen, of post-Romantic perspectives on subjectivity and writing.
POST-ROMANTIC WRITING MACHINES / PIGLIA
We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier;
we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask
what it functions with, in connection with what other things it
does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what
bodies without organs it makes its own converge. […] A book
itself is a little machine.—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari5
Piglia’s theory of literary innovation receives its fullest metafictional development in La ciudad ausente (1992). The major part of the novel consists of
a series of stories generated by a storytelling machine called Elena who is at
the heart of the resistance operating against state control in Buenos Aires.
Elena’s status as a character is thoroughly enigmatic. She appears at points
to be a real machine, complete with nodes and cables, possessing solid physical dimensions – “una forma achatada, octagonal” (a flattened, octagonal
form)6 – and locked up by the state in a closed museum in an attempt to
control the threat she poses to the regime. At other points, we understand
that this incarceration does not prevent her from continuing to operate in
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163
a virtual realm, generating stories that circulate among the inhabitants of
Buenos Aires. Elena is the wife of the writer Macedonio Fernández, who
appears as a character in the novel and invents a machine to immortalize
her memory, but she may also be a psychiatric patient hallucinating in one
of the city’s clinics. Elena’s stories make up much of the text of La ciudad
ausente; they are linked by a paratext, the story of Junior’s investigation into
the origins of the storytelling machine.
In referring to its own genesis and evolution, La ciudad ausente draws
explicit analogies with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, the role of genetic
reproduction in evolution, and with biological models of self-organization
in open systems. These models are brought to resonate with the Formalist
concepts of literary evolution so significant to Piglia’s approach to literature
and criticism, which have already been discussed in relation to Respiración
artificial in Chapter 1. The narrative machines pictured in both La ciudad ausente and Blanco nocturno (2010) dismantle distinctions between the organic
and the mechanical in a manner that leads us away from the Romantic opposition of these forces and firmly in the direction of Deleuze and Guattari’s
synthesizing concept of the machinic. Piglia removes the author as the
central figure in literary innovation to explore the question of machinic
creativity. His texts operate as machines in the Deleuzean sense, forming
new and often surprising assemblages with other texts, producing and being
produced by a multiplicity of connections.
Tangled hierarchies
The narrative technique with which Piglia experiments in Prisión perpetua,
putting signs and stories into circulation within and between different narrative hierarchies (as discussed in Chapter 2), is brought to full expression in
La ciudad ausente in the central trope of the storytelling machine. J. Andrew
Brown argues that, in many ways, La ciudad ausente is paradigmatic of
cybernetic fiction, as defined by Porush, both in its presentation of Elena as a
“truly cyborg narrator” and in “its attention to the idea of language as cybernetically organized”; his analysis of the novel highlights the quasi-hypertextual or virtual properties of the text.7 Through the storytelling machine, both
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a character in the novel and the “author” of the short stories contained within it, Piglia creates a proliferating network of textual nodes and nuclei that
defy attempts to separate them into clear narrative hierarchies. Recursion,
feedback loops, and tangled hierarchies present a problem for a traditional
hermeneutics in search of transcendent meaning. But in Piglia – as I will
show – this realization leads not to a cynicism with regard to hermeneutical
interpretation but to an understanding of the principles of literary creation
and the vast potential in literature for self-renewal.
It is often unclear whether narrative strands and events in La ciudad
ausente are to be read straightforwardly as part of the novel’s plot, as the
hallucinations or memories (real or implanted) of one or more characters,
or as transmissions from some external source. Repeated allusions to Gödel
and Tarski reinforce the sense of a continual movement up through an infinity of narrative levels, as each level is subject to self-reference and recursion,
and the search for an ultimate meaning or metalanguage is always deferred.
The narratives of La ciudad ausente are caught up in tangled hierarchies akin
to Gödelian “strange loops,” in which propositions about the truth-value of
logical statements are found within the same system as those statements to
which they refer, allowing for the possibility of paradoxical statements such
as “this statement is false.” Presented as one of the machine’s stories, Junior
discovers in the museum a tableau of the Majestic Hotel room he has just
visited, complete with the wardrobe and the bottle of perfume the woman he
met there was searching for. These are details from what we had understood
to be the paratext of Junior’s search for the truth of the machine, not one of
the machine’s own texts. A strange loop confuses the distinction between
the investigating subject and the object of the investigation. 8
Motifs from the machine’s stories often recur in this way in the story
of Junior’s investigation into the machine. In a more complex example, the
first narrator introduces Junior as the son of Mister Mac Kensey, an English
station master whose wife left with his daughter to go and live in Barcelona;
later, Junior hears a story that is structurally suspiciously similar (told by the
storytelling machine in the museum, here a second-order narrator) but this
time about Russo, in which Ríos (a third-order narrator) mentions a mechanical bird kept in the house of an English station master called McKinley,
4 | Machines, Metaphors, and Multiplicity: Creativity Beyond the Individual
165
whose wife had also left him. The recurrence, with variation, of narrative
nuclei in this way gives weight to the notion that the storytelling machine
might actually be the narrator of the entire text, as well as a lower-order
narrator. This interpretation is in fact suggested by Piglia himself in an
interview, when he proposes that Junior may be just another of the fictional
characters invented by the storytelling machine, conceived so that he could
come and save her.9
Gödel and the creative potential of the undecidable
The fact that the different orders of narration in the novel cannot logically
be separated causes a particular difficulty in interpretation and encourages
the reader to engage in a fruitless search for an ever-higher order of narration, a more powerful language or metanarrative, which might contain and
comment on the seepages between lower-level orders. Nevertheless, Gödel
and Tarski – whose undefinability theorem similarly states that, in a given
arithmetic system, the truth of that arithmetic cannot be defined within that
same system – are not primarily cited in La ciudad ausente as evidence for
the fallibility of human logic and the failure of the rationalist enterprise but
for the creative possibilities that seem to be suggested by the discovery of the
limitations of the formalist project in mathematics.
In his account of how the storytelling machine in La ciudad ausente came
into being, Russo points to the importance of the metaphysical thought of
the writer Macedonio Fernández. For Macedonio, “Lo que no es define el
universo igual que el ser” (what does not exist defines the universe as much
as what does exist).10 Macedonio’s interest in possible worlds becomes a key
principle in the machine’s construction. As Russo explains,
Macedonio colocaba lo posible en la esencia del mundo. Por
eso comenzamos discutiendo las hipótesis de Gödel. Ningún
sistema formal puede afirmar su propia coherencia. Partimos
de ahí, la realidad virtual, los mundos posibles. El teorema de
Gödel y el tratado de Alfred Tarski sobre los bordes del universo, el sentido del límite.11
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Macedonio planted the possible within the world’s very essence.
For that reason we began to discuss Gödel’s hypotheses. No
formal system can prove its own consistency. That was our
starting point, virtual reality, possible worlds. Gödel’s theorem
and Alfred Tarski’s treatise on the boundaries of the universe,
the concept of limit.
There is no direct link, in mathematical or philosophical terms, between
Gödel’s theorem and virtual reality or possible worlds. Piglia draws on
Gödel’s findings obliquely to suggest that the limitations of formal logic
give rise to new possible orders, in which, as for Macedonio, fantasy and
reality are not opposed to each other; it is the discovery of the limit of axiomatic logic that allows us to imagine other worlds that are not governed by
that logic or to posit realms of existence in which truth is undecidable. The
association Piglia establishes between Gödelian logic and the invention of
fiction and new worlds would have been even more explicit if he had carried
through the original plan of giving Gödel’s name to the creator of the storytelling machine in the novel.12
Piglia’s (mis)reading of Gödel bears a resemblance to Lacan’s. For Lacan,
the undecidability of statements that cannot be reduced to axiomatic truth,
and open up a faultline within formal logic, can be identified with the Real.13
As Guillermo Martínez explains, an analogy is drawn in Lacan’s work between the discourse that emerges from analysis and a logical system that is
found to have “fallas” (flaws) or “aberturas” (gaps, fissures): it is these that
provide a point of access to the unconscious and should therefore constitute the analyst’s focus.14 This process, by which a failing in logic exposes
a truth that cannot otherwise be expressed, is perhaps most clearly seen in
Piglia’s “La loca y el relato del crimen.” Renzi applies the skills of a linguistician to dissect the transcript of the madwoman’s testimony, stripping away
the repeated forms to discover “Lo que no entra en ese orden, lo que no se
puede clasificar, lo que sobra, el desperdicio” (what doesn’t fit in the scheme,
what cannot be classified, what is left over, redundant).15 In what cannot be
categorized, cannot be communicated, lies the truth about the identity of
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Larry’s murderer and points to corruption at the heart of the system. In best
post-structuralist manner, the redundant, or that which cannot be proved or
categorized, threatens the integrity of the whole: it cracks open the system
of the text.
Self-reference, open systems, autopoiesis
These fissures in logical systems, opened up in La ciudad ausente by means
of self-reference, may destroy any illusion of coherence; however, they are
also crucial to the renewal and the self-transforming potential of the literary
text. The proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem rests on the possibility of
a statement that refers to itself but whose truth-value is undecidable within
the terms of the system. Similarly, in Piglia, self-reference demonstrates the
incomplete, and therefore open and dynamic, nature of the system. Junior
discovers that the state wants to neutralize the machine and take it out of
circulation, as:
Algo estaba fuera de control. Se había filtrado una serie de
datos inesperados, como si los archivos estuvieran abiertos.
[…] Habían empezado a entrar datos sobre el Museo y sobre la
construcción. Estaba diciendo algo sobre su propio estado. […]
Filtraba datos reales […].16
Something was out of control. A series of unexpected facts had
leaked in, as if the archives were open. […] Details about the
Museum and its construction had started entering the loop.
The machine was saying something about its own state. […]
Real data was seeping in […].
Self-reference here is not, therefore, a kind of narcissism, but the point at
which reality seeps into the text, at which it cannot remain hermetically
sealed off from the real world. As Ana explains to Junior, “Ha empezado
a hablar de sí misma. Por eso la quieren parar. No se trata de una máquina, sino de un organismo más complejo” (it has begun to speak about itself.
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That’s why they want to stop her. This isn’t a machine, but a more complex
organism).17 Reflexivity here is inextricably associated with the machine’s
nature as an open system, engaging in exchanges with external reality across
its boundaries: “Los hechos se incorporaban directamente, ya no era un sistema cerrado, tramaba datos reales” (events were being incorporated directly, it was not a closed system anymore, reality was getting into the plots).18
Piglia’s use of Gödel’s theorem throws light on his paradoxical claim that
self-reference is one of the greatest expressions of literature’s imbrication
with the social:19 (very roughly) following Gödel, it is the point at which
the system demonstrates its incompleteness and its interactions with other
systems from which it had been assumed to be independent.
Another metaphor suggested in La ciudad ausente for this interdependence is drawn from biology rather than mathematics. First theorized by
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, autopoiesis refers to the processes through which a living cell or organism produces the elements it needs
to maintain its bounded structure. It therefore differs from an “allopoietic”
system, which uses elements to create something other than itself. As N.
Katherine Hayles observes in her study of the implications of their work for
the field of cybernetics, the autonomy ascribed to the organism in the autopoietic model is held in tension with “structural coupling,” which describes
the interaction of that organism with its environment.20 Varela would go
on to place greater emphasis on that interaction in his theory of “enaction,”
which, while remaining faithful to the principles of autopoiesis, posits “the
active engagement of an organism with the environment as the cornerstone
of the organism’s development.”21 The storytelling machine of La ciudad
ausente mimics these processes, maintaining and reproducing itself by
means of a constant exchange of matter and energy across its boundaries,
assimilating other fictions and reality itself into its own stories. Piglia’s texts,
systems, and models invariably demonstrate the dynamic self-reference that
Ira Livingston identifies as underlying both biological autopoiesis and the
operations of the reflexive text, in which “the point at which the text closes
back on itself is also where it connects with everything that sustains it.”22
The autopoietic system becomes a useful model for thinking about the
relationship in art between self-reference and openness to other systems, two
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orientations that are more often seen as incompatible, the first charged with
narcissism or aesthetic separatism. In his account of self-organizing processes in nature, Erich Jantsch explains clearly how the metabolic exchanges that
take place between an organism and its environment are “self-referential” in
the sense that an autopoietic system “is primarily geared to self-renewal.”23
Intertextuality becomes just the most clearly visible example of the way in
which the text is engaged in a complex and continually evolving network
of relations with everything that it is not, relating productively with its environment as part of the process of self-renewal. The wealth of intertextual references in La ciudad ausente – to Macedonio Fernández, Lugones,
Faulkner, Dante, Poe, and several other authors – defines the novel as an
open system, one that draws energy from transactions taking place across its
borders, feeding on pre-existing texts, which are then subjected to a process
of transformation. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake provide several of the
motifs circulating in the novel, and there is mention of the names of many
of Joyce’s characters, usually slightly distorted or misspelled, Buck Mulligan
appearing here as “Bob Mulligan” and Anna Livia Plurabelle sometimes
referred to as “Ana Lidia.”24 Such richness in intertextuality provides fertile
hunting-ground for the literary critic, duped into uncovering each allusion
and treating it as a clue to a hidden story or theme, as if the novel’s meaning
could be rendered through detective investigations of this kind.
This approach is also encouraged by the repetition of narrative motifs.
The experience gained by the machine through composing different stories
means that they do not simply proliferate in a dispersed manner, each one
moving further away from the original nucleus. In fact, we are told that the
“key” to understanding the machine’s workings is that it learns as it narrates, conscious of the stories it has already told, and that “quizá termine
por construirles una trama común” (perhaps it will end up constructing a
common plot for them).25 However, the recurring elements and motifs are
presented here as materials for future stories, not clues to some overarching narrative already in existence. This is an important distinction. What
is revealed therefore is not a hidden meaning that may be accessed through
interpretation but a principle of construction. This emphasis on defining the
text according to how it has been constructed rather than how it might be
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interpreted is precisely that which interests Piglia most in the Formalist approaches of Shklovsky and Eichenbaum.26
If – as Jameson maintains – for a Formalist critic a work “speaks only
of its own coming into being, of its own construction” and of the “formal
problems” it attempts to resolve,27 this description is of clear relevance to La
ciudad ausente. The novel is most effectively read, not as a representation of
cybernetic society or even as an exercise in anti-totalitarian textual politics,
but as a solution to a formal problem: how to encapsulate in a single, linear
form the idea of iterability and endless mutation, or how to construct a text
with multiple entry points. We become alert to the manner in which the text
is created from fragments of other texts, by means of operations of appropriation, transposition, and transformation. Like Scheherazade of the Arabian
Nights, mentioned in the novel, what holds these micro-stories together is
obviously an artifice, a formal device. The subject of La ciudad ausente is the
act of storytelling, and this produces what Tzvetan Todorov in his analysis
of the Arabian Nights calls an “a-psychologism,” in which narrative does not
exist to illustrate character but characters exist to bring forth narratives.28
Our approach to the novel – and to Piglia’s work in general – changes
radically when we view the many intertextual references in his fiction, not as
hidden messages for the critic to decode, but as the deliberate foregrounding
of a method of narrative construction. This approach is the one Piglia models in his own critical work, as can be appreciated, for example, in his analysis
of the role of Homer’s Odyssey in Joyce’s Ulysses. In spite of the best efforts of
Jungian critics to treat the mythical references as symbols to be interpreted,
Piglia insists that the role played by the Odyssey in Joyce’s novel is really as
a formal device that allows him to order his proliferating material, a way to
lend some coherence to the plot of the novel. It should be understood as “una
etapa necesaria en la construcción de la obra, como el molde de hierro de una
escultura que desaparece, retirado o escondido por el material” (a necessary
stage in the construction of the work, like the iron mould of a sculpture that
disappears, removed or hidden by the material).29
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Blanco nocturno and the dream-text: from interpretation to
construction
This notion of literary construction emerges even more explicitly in Blanco
nocturno. At the heart of the novel, a rather unconventional twist on the
detective genre, we find another writing machine. During his investigation
of a murder, the journalist Renzi encounters an Arltian figure of the mad
inventor, Luca Belladona, who locks himself away in an old car factory,
in the middle of nowhere, to pursue a crazed quest to construct a different kind of machine. The walls of the factory are covered with words and
phrases, underlined or circled, linked together with arrows and diagrams.
Every morning, Luca combines and recombines the images and phrases of
his dreams with those from previous nights, treating them as if they were
fragments of a single narrative, until the pieces fit together naturally. A laboratory-like room houses the machine proper, a cylinder with little boards on
which Luca writes words and draws images related to his dreams. A series
of nickel-plated cogs move the plates into different positions to create new
possibilities for relations between the different phrases, and therefore new
possible meanings. It is, in effect, a writing machine, functioning in a very
similar way to the storytelling machine of La ciudad ausente, which subjects
initial narrative nuclei to processes of transformation, creating ever-new
versions.
Explicitly, here, these nuclei derive from Jungian archetypes. As Luca
explains, Man and His Symbols (1964) expounds Jung’s theory that the
content of dreams, studied systematically, can be seen to follow a certain
order. Although they evoke different scenes and images every night, dreams
nevertheless correspond to a “modelo común” (common model) that orchestrates the emergence, disappearance, and recurrence of certain contents over
time, “como si fuera un solo relato que se iba armando en fragmentos discontinuos” (as if it were a single story gradually assembled from discontinuous fragments).30 There is a clear echo here of the “trama común” (common
plot) that links the stories of the machine in La ciudad ausente. In the same
way, while evoking theories of interpretation and analytical approaches to
the dream/text, Piglia is not positing the existence of a hidden truth that
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might “explain” the text but a principle of textual construction that points
to the existence of narrative archetypes. Luca’s machine does not reveal past
traumas or analyze concealed truths: he believes, instead, that it may be used
to predict the future.
The presence of Jung’s theories in Piglia’s novels does not, ultimately,
endorse a “depth psychology” approach to understanding the meaning
of texts. Dreams and symbols do not await an analyst’s interpretation,
symptomatic of deeper drives or hidden narratives. Instead, they become
materials for construction. Again, Piglia’s interest in Jungian archetypes
takes us back to Russian Formalism. Piglia’s narrative nuclei function very
much like the archetypal tales identified by structural anthropologists and
Formalist literary critics such as Vladimir Propp: the original stories from
which others are generated, in all their variations. Both the machine in La
ciudad ausente and the one in Nocturno blanco produce multiple variations
in this way, drawing on a stock of common narrative figures. Like Propp,
who discovered thirty-one basic narrative units in his analysis of Russian
folktales,31 Piglia is also interested in the primordial narrative elements and
functions that underpin the construction of stories. Indeed, he goes much
further than Propp, reducing them to just two: “en el fondo todos los relatos
cuentan una investigación o cuentan un viaje” (essentially, all stories narrate
an investigation or a journey).32
The operation of the machines in La ciudad ausente and Blanco nocturno, drawing on pre-existing forms and shuffling narrative elements to produce new patterns and series, establish literary creativity very much as an
ars combinatoria. As Ítalo Calvino suggests in his imaginative recreation of
the evolution of storytelling, from just a few “prefabricated elements,” such
as Propp’s narrative functions, “unlimited combinations, permutations,
transformations” become possible.33 The machines do not simply run preset
programs but have a creative power of their own. Fed first with the story
“William Wilson,” the machine in La ciudad ausente captures the form
of Poe’s narrative but alters the content. Every story in Piglia generates a
potentially infinite number of others. Unlike the Freudian unconscious, a
repository of repressed desires, Jung’s account of the unconscious emphasizes its creative capacity, with the collective unconscious acting as a reservoir
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of archetypes, which are then processed in different ways by the personal
unconscious. Luca believes that his recent ability to construct completely
original objects directly from his imagination derives from the operation in
his dreams of “cierta fuerza suprapersonal” (a certain supraindividual force)
that “interfería activamente en forma creativa y llevaba la dirección de un
designio secreto” (actively interfered, in a creative manner, and put a secret
plan into motion).34
Inventions of all kinds abound in La ciudad ausente, but they do not
emerge from nothing: Piglia rejects the possibility of creation ex nihilo. Russo
shows Junior a pocket watch that transforms itself at the touch of a button
into a tiny chess board: it is the first chess-playing machine to be made in
Argentina, using the watch’s microscopic cogs and wheels to program the
game and its hours for memory. He tells him: “Inventar una máquina es fácil,
si usted puede modificar las piezas de un mecanismo anterior. Las posibilidades de convertir en otra cosa lo que ya existe son infinitas. No podría hacer
algo de la nada” (Inventing a machine is easy, if you can modify the parts of a
previous mechanism. The possibilities of converting one thing into another
are infinite. I couldn’t make something from nothing).35 The storytelling
machine is similarly pragmatic in its recyclings and transformations: “Se las
arregla como puede. Usa lo que hay y lo que parece perdido lo hace volver
transformado en otra cosa. Así es la vida” (she gets by in whatever way she
can. She uses what is there and what seems lost she brings back, transformed
into something else. That’s how life is).36
Genetic recombination and the role of chance
Piglia draws significantly on the role of genetic reproduction in evolution as
a metaphor for the creative recombinations of literature. The machine, once
programmed with “un conjunto variable de núcleos narrativos” (a variable
set of narrative nuclei)37 produces an endless series of variations, stories that
are manifestly related to the original but have been transformed in some
manner. As Dr. Arana declares in the novel, “El código genético y el código
verbal presentan las mismas características” (the genetic code and the linguistic code share the same features).38 Like the myriad permutations of just
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four nucleotides that make up the DNA of every living organism, the meanings that can be generated from the words and structures of language are
for practical purposes inexhaustible. As a model of creativity, the language
of genetics cuts up the flows and rivers of Romantic inspiration into a series
of discrete entities that are endlessly copied and recombined in new ways.
Piglia’s storytelling machine works rather like the tarot cards in Calvino’s
The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), in which a finite number of figures
can be combined in almost infinite ways, each taking on a different meaning when placed in a different order or within a different constellation, and
forming in this way “a machine for constructing stories.”39 Calvino argues
that the “triumph of historical continuity and biological continuity” in the
nineteenth century (Hegel and Darwin) has been replaced by the knowledge
that “the endless variety of living forms can be reduced to the combination of
certain finite quantities” in the form of the acids and bases of DNA. 40 This
vision permeates our thought and our understanding of the world, such that
“the process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and
combination over all that is flux.”41
In biology, it is an imperfection in the transcription of the genetic code
that allows for the mutations that drive evolution; similarly, Piglia’s stories
evolve and thrive precisely because of their minute deviations from other
texts in the series and their encounters with chance. Central to the concept
of creativity in La ciudad ausente is the idea of a crucial error in translating
or transforming texts that allows variation to occur. The text identified by
Junior as “la frase inicial de la serie” (the initial phrase in the series) is a brief
biographical sketch of Stephen Stevensen taken from “Encuentro en SaintNazaire,” with some sentences paraphrased and others reproduced verbatim. 42 As Junior reads further, it transpires that this narrative has undergone a series of transformations, as the narrator is invited, not as a writer
to a Maison des écrivains in France, but as a doctor to an estancia owned
by a scientific community in Argentina. He reflects that “Las imprecisiones
formaban parte de la construcción de la historia. No se podía ajustar a un
tiempo fijo y el espacio era indeciso y a la vez detallado con precisión minuciosa” (the imprecisions formed part of the story’s construction. It could
not be fitted into a fixed time and its space was undecided and, at the same
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time, detailed with meticulous precision). 43 Many of Piglia’s stories hinge on
a tiny but decisive error that can change an entire destiny: we are introduced
in the novel, for example, to a Japanese soldier who, determined to carry out
his duty and convinced that the war was eternal, obediently remained in the
jungle to fight the American forces for thirty years. In this case too, “salvo
por un dato casi microscópico (la firma de paz en un papel), todo su universo
era real” (with the exception of one almost microscopic detail, the signing of
a peace treaty on a piece of paper, his whole universe was real). 44
This focus on the role played by chance and microscopic variation in
evolution again inspires a method of composition: minute alterations to the
narrative premises of one story lead to the construction of another. Piglia’s
understanding of evolution always emphasizes the contingent and the accidental, and therefore also resonates with the Foucauldian genealogical
approach that, far from attempting to “restore an unbroken continuity”
between past and present, highlights instead “the accidents, the minute
deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations” that shape existence. 45 The emphasis on
chance and error also recalls the importance of these in Formalist accounts
of literary evolution. In Tynyanov’s words, what critics label as “an exception
to the system, a mistake” often turns out to be “a dislocation of the system”; the
“opposing constructive principle,” which leads to innovation, “takes shape
from ‘chance’ results and ‘chance’ exceptions and errors.”46
In the figure of Russo in La ciudad ausente, the role of inventor-scientist and storyteller-artist are conflated, much in the same way as they are in
Canterel, the protagonist of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914), in which
increasingly complex machines provoke the telling of ever-more elaborate
tales. Roussel’s mechanistic compositional technique, which makes use of
puns as formal constraints, is criticized by Porush for its stultifying effect,
“designed to produce a literature that recaptures the merely haphazard elements of language within a larger structure of logic, an artistic positivism
that leaves nothing to chance.”47 Drawing on twentieth-century advances in
genetic biology, Piglia’s text-as-machine is designed to operate in a very different manner: order is not imposed from above but emerges from a complex
sequence of chance events and a form of collective memory.
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Berg comments perceptively on Piglia’s construction of newness, not as
rupture, but as the rediscovery of distant filiations, or the unprogrammed
forging of connections between hitherto unrelated elements:
La novedad ya no debería ser entendida como lo hacían las
vanguardias históricas de principios de nuestro siglo, es decir
como una ruptura que borra las huellas del pasado, sino como
la introducción de paradojas en los discursos existentes. Una
política vanguardista contemporánea podría ser ésta: encontrar
paradojas, alianzas o parentescos allí donde no se ven, introducirlos allí donde no están. 48
Novelty should no longer be understood as it was by the historical avant-gardes of the beginning of our [twentieth] century, as
a rupture that erases the traces of the past, but as the introduction of paradoxes in existing discourses. A contemporary avantgarde approach could be as follows: to find paradoxes, alliances
or relations of kinship that are not visible, to introduce them if
they do not exist.
Forging new alliances, tracing oblique and distant family relationships, recycling and refunctioning existing forms: this is not only the language of
biological evolution but also that of Formalism. It is in this respect that La
ciudad ausente, apparently so different in style and focus, can be read as a
direct continuation of Respiración artificial (see Chapter 1). Piglia finds in
Borges the model of a writer who is always a reader, reading against other writers, betraying what he reads to appropriate it for his own ends. In
Borges’s “inclinación deliberada a leer mal, a leer fuera de lugar, a relacionar
series imposibles” (deliberate inclination to read badly, to read out of context, to relate impossible series together)49 lies a notion of creativity that is
fundamental to Piglia’s own work.
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The machinic, beyond organic vs. mechanical
As a theory of creativity, Piglia’s understanding of the expressive power of
genetic recombination is decidedly post-Romantic. So, too, is his overhaul
of the old conflict between organic and mechanistic visions of the world,
proposing in its place a series of affinities between human creativity and the
machinic. Piglia does not respect the distinctions between the organic and
the mechanical that underpin Coleridge’s theory of aesthetics and much
of the Romantic rupture with Classical artistry. For Coleridge, the role of
the imagination is to bring multiplicity into unity, forming – as in nature
– a self-evolving whole that is greater than its parts; herein lies the contrast
between “imagination” and “fancy,” which can only employ an “aggregative
power,”50 bringing together existing materials in different combinations,
much like a mechanical apparatus, which can be dismantled and reassembled. Edward Young had drawn a similar distinction between the natural
and the mechanical in his Conjectures on Original Composition of 1759:
An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made:
Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those
Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not
their own.51
By contrast, in Piglia’s machines, recombination emerges as the primary
creative operation. Moreover, the renewed power of literature derives from
the consistent commingling and co-functioning of the organic and the mechanical in his work. The machines of La ciudad ausente and Blanco nocturno
are strikingly life-like, or even fused in some way with human memory and
consciousness, like Russo’s mechanical bird, which appears to breathe, or the
tiny boards of Luca’s machine, made to move “como si aleteara un pájaro” (as
if a bird was flapping its wings).52 Conversely, human creativity is pictured as
a system, like Elena, “de tubos y de cables” (of tubes and cables),53 in which
newness is produced through a network of relations, both logical and metaphorical, and in which – as Croce says in Blanco nocturno – “Nada vale por sí
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mismo, todo vale en relación con otra ecuación que no conocemos” (nothing
means anything in itself, everything means something in relation to another
equation we don’t know).54
As Martínez points out, at the heart of the formalist quest to demonstrate that mathematics followed a finite system of axioms – definitively
shown to be incorrect by Gödel – was the attempt to prove that all mathematical demonstration could be carried out mechanically.55 Gödel’s theorem has often been used to “prove” that machines will never be able to match
human intelligence. Roger Penrose, for example, draws on Gödel in his
argument that human consciousness is non-algorithmic and cannot therefore be reduced to the operations of a computer.56 Human intelligence is
distinguished by the ability to move fairly effortlessly between a hierarchy of
systems – moving from speaking about a subject to speaking about the language used in speaking about that subject, for example – whereas artificial
intelligence is limited to the correct execution of a specific set of operations
within a system. Douglas Hofstadter observes that “the thought processes
involved in doing mathematics, just like those in other areas, involve ‘tangled
hierarchies’ in which thoughts on one level can affect thoughts on any other
level. Levels are not cleanly separated, as the formalist version of what mathematics is would have one believe.”57
In Piglia, the capacity for reflexivity and the ability to transcend mechanical rules in order to create something new is associated as much with
machinic intelligence as the human variety. Calvino imagines something very
similar when he posits the idea that a machine could be used to produce
literature, and not just of a logical, classicist variety. Given recent advances
in cybernetics towards producing machines capable of learning, he suggests
that “nothing prevents us from foreseeing a literature-machine that at a certain point feels unsatisfied with its own traditionalism and starts to propose
new ways of writing, turning its own codes completely upside down.”58 We
have come full circle: instead of a Romantic rebellion of the artist against
mechanization, we can now imagine a machine that satisfies that same human need to shake up the system. The storytelling machine of La ciudad
ausente operates very much in this manner, performing acts of resistance to
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authoritarian control and defying literary convention in its radical reworking of divisions between the real and the virtual.
The machine in Blanco nocturno is in fact described as being more inventive than nature. In Luca’s account of the objects he has created, he differentiates clearly between the products of machines and the products of
nature, insisting on the originality of the first and the imitative, second-hand
quality of the second. Nature’s products are not really products as such, but
“una réplica natural de objetos anteriores que se reproducen igual una y otra
vez. Un campo de trigo es un campo de trigo” (a natural replica of previous
objects that are reproduced identically again and again. A wheat field is a
wheat field).59 By contrast, machines are “instrumentos muy delicados; sirven para realizar nuevos objetos inesperados, más y más complejos” (very
delicate instruments; they are used to make new and unexpected objects, of
greater and greater complexity). 60 Unlike nature, machines can produce new
objects for which there is no previous model available simply to copy.
Although Piglia does not use a specifically Deleuzean lexicon, his machines are strikingly homologous to Deleuze’s, for whom “machinic […] does
not mean either mechanical or organic.”61 Claire Colebrook gives a succinct
summary of the difference between the mechanical and the machinic in
Deleuze and Guattari’s work: “A mechanism is a self-enclosed movement
that merely ticks over, never transforming or producing itself. A machinic
becoming makes a connection with what is not itself in order to transform
and maximise itself.”62 For Deleuze and Guattari, both living organisms
and technological apparatuses can function as machines if they engage in
processes of becoming through being connected with other machines in
ever-evolving assemblages. Those connections produce further connections,
none of which are organized by any transcendent figure. Piglia’s texts are
machinic in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, functioning as an assemblage
together with other assemblages, forming and being formed by multiple
connections that are often creative in their unpredictability.
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A dream no longer in need of its dreamer
In the same way that Piglia’s theory of literary creativity rescues recombination and machinic production from their denigration at the hands of the
Romantics, his notion of authorship thoroughly undermines Romantic notions of the individual genius. La ciudad ausente creates a number of explicit
intertextual links with Foucault’s famous essay “What is an Author?” of 1969.
One of the most obvious of these is Piglia’s use of the figure of Scheherezade
in The Thousand and One Nights, who postpones death through the telling
of stories and is also cited by Foucault in his essay. Foucault’s central argument is that the author in modernity has become a function “by which one
impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition,
decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”63 Our critical emphasis on the
author as the originator of meaning in a text, “as a genius, as a perpetual
surging of invention,” effectively reduces its possible meanings and therefore contains what Foucault refers to as “the great danger with which fiction
threatens our world,” which is the possibility of transgressive discourses and
the proliferation of meanings. 64 Literature, like Scheherazade’s narratives,
can “ward off death,”65 but only by metaphorically killing off its author and
becoming anonymous and infinitely iterable.
The Romantic figure of the artist-genius places limits on the text’s possible meanings, its capacity to elude or transform an original set of premises,
and therefore its potential resistance to orthodoxy. The machinic qualities
of Piglia’s storytelling cyborg in La ciudad ausente are precisely those that
open up the free circulation of fiction. As we saw in Chapter 2, the correspondence between creativity and the depersonalization of literature in
Piglia’s work complicates the more conventional relationship established in
apocalyptic (Romantic) science fiction between machines and dehumanization. Idelber Avelar, in his very insightful reading of the novel, argues that
the storytelling machine
metaphorizes the possibility of creating new stories, but “new”
and “create” need to be understood here in a most antiromantic sense. The machine handles combinations, plagiarism,
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apocryphal narratives, and disinteriorized affects. Piglia depersonalizes mourning and desubjectivizes affect. 66
This depersonalization unties the text from its author and frees it to circulate in a virtual space.
In “Las ruinas circulares,” Borges imagines a man who dreams up another but who discovers himself in turn to be created through another man’s
dream. Piglia severs these chains of ontological dependency and creates a
dream no longer in need of its dreamer, which is free to pursue multiple
forms of embodiment. The machine’s peculiar power in La ciudad ausente
rests on an ability to insert her stories into the consciousness of her readers
and listeners to the extent that they merge with those individual pasts and
become indistinguishable from them: “ella produce historias, indefinidamente, relatos convertidos en recuerdos invisibles que todos piensan que son
propios” (she produces stories, indefinitely, narratives that become invisible
memories that everyone thinks are their own). 67 Iterability and anonymity,
rather than the individual subjectivity of the author, become forces of radical creativity and unexpected forms of resistance against the discourses of
authoritarianism.
That this depersonalization is much more readily associated with the inhuman and the workings of oppression than it is with creativity and freedom
is evidence of the persistent legacy of Romantic notions of authorship in our
own era. Susan Stewart refers to “the terror of the doll,” which, if animated,
“would only cause the obliteration of the subject – the inhuman spectacle of
a dream no longer in need of its dreamer.”68 M. H. Abrams laments the “systematic dehumanizing” of literature that characterizes the “Age of Reading,”
such that “the text forfeits its status as a purposeful utterance about human
beings and human concerns, and even its individuality, becoming simply an
episode in an all-encompassing textuality.” In this dissolving of the text, “the
relations between authors which had traditionally been known as ‘influence’
are depersonalized into ‘intertextuality,’ a reverberation between ownerless
sequences of signs.”69
The much more positive relationship established between depersonalization and creativity in Piglia’s work bears distinct traces of Formalist
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approaches, which were of course highly influential in structuralist and
post-structuralist thought. In Respiración artificial, as we saw in Chapter
1, Piglia draws on the Formalist understanding of literary evolution as a
discontinuous, dialectical process that skips generations, takes up oblique
or broken lines, and creates unexpected alliances. In La ciudad ausente, he
takes a step further in imagining innovation and renewal in literature as
the Formalist “dialectic play of devices”70 that transcends the individual altogether. The Formalists set themselves the task of accounting for literary
evolution “outside individual personality” as Boris M. Eichenbaum put it.71
Victor Erlich explains that the literary genius “was reduced to the status
of an agent of impersonal forces,” citing Shklovsky’s representation of the
creator as “simply the geometrical point of intersection of forces operative
outside of him’.”72
J. Andrew Brown holds back from categorizing La ciudad ausente as a
“cybernetic fiction” for the reason that, although Junior becomes a virtual
reader of sorts, the novel as a whole “is still a traditional book; it does not
allow the actual reader options like a hypertext narrative would, nor does
it create for him or her a virtual reality.”73 It is of course true that the novel
takes the form of a consecutive series of printed pages and therefore does
not correspond to the strictest definition of the term “cybernetic fiction.”
However, as we saw in Chapter 2, evident in Piglia’s work is an understanding of literature as the constructor par excellence of virtual reality, implanting artificial experiences in the reader and creating affects that did not exist
before. The discussions above have focussed on the sustained enquiry in
Piglia’s texts into the nature of biological and artificial processes that are
the primary focus of cybernetics. Even more powerfully, though, the texts
themselves exemplify the kind of creative machines envisioned by cybernetics, which transcend the division between the human and the mechanical.
Porush argues that as the machine metaphor has become more and
more prevalent in our culture, to the extent that it has come (in formalism
and cybernetics, for example) to represent the workings of language and our
own consciousness, it acquires the status of “something even more powerful
than a metaphor.” Borrowing from Umberto Eco’s definition of the “icon” as
“a model of relationships,” Porush proposes that we consider the machine in
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literature as an icon, “capable of crystallizing, reflecting and embodying not
only a complex system of meanings (determinism, logic, order, system) but
the act of making meanings itself.”74 If Piglia’s fiction amply demonstrates
the status of the machine as icon in the manner Porush describes, it is
equally evident that it draws on an updated version of that “model of relationships,” in which the machine does not – as in so much literature from
the eighteenth century onwards – signify determinism, mechanism, and the
clockwork universe but rather the dynamic interconnectedness of all things,
the interdependence of the human, natural, and technological realms, the
thorough imbrication of the material and the virtual, and the complexity
that confounds simple accounts of causality. This rescues the machine from
the more arid or formulaic of modernist experiments with literary composition as the application of techniques, liberating the text to operate as a
Deleuzean assemblage together with other assemblages, endlessly creating
meaning through myriad connections, most of which are not programmed
by the inventor.
ENTROPY AND METAPHOR / COHEN
Zebra-streaked, tiger-striped, variegated, motley, fleck-speckled, bedizened, star-spangled. We invent, we produce like the
Demiurge, in and through the mix.—Michel Serres75
Entropy, as stated in the first two laws of thermodynamics, increases as the
temperatures in an isolated system become more uniform over time. From
the discovery of these laws, scientists moved quickly to speculate about the
heat death of the universe: William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) was the first
to posit the exhaustion of energy in the universe in his paper of 1852, “On
a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy.”
The idea was extended and popularized by Hermann von Helmholtz and
William Rankine, but it was not until the New Wave of science fiction in
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the 1960s and 1970s that it was thoroughly mined for its fictional potential
by North American and British writers such as Philip K. Dick, Thomas
Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and Michael Moorcock. What Pynchon was later
to refer to as the “thermodynamical gloom” of his early short story on the
theme, “Entropy” (1960), chimed all too convincingly with the pessimism of
Beat literature and the most apocalyptic strains of North American science
fiction.76
Pynchon and Ballard are key referents in Cohen’s fiction and critical
essays; however, their use of the entropy metaphor is substantially reworked
within Cohen’s highly reflexive texts to serve as a trope for creativity. This
transformation is particularly evident in El fin de lo mismo, a collection of
short stories published in 1992. At first sight, entropy appears to be employed in some of these fictions as a metaphor to narrate a familiar trajectory towards homogenization, stasis, and death, marking the potential
elimination of all difference in Cohen’s hyper-mediatized, market-governed
societies. However, it is also resignified as the potential source of newness
and unpredictability and often completely refigured for much more positive
ends, specifically to point to the creative power of literature in staging an encounter with radical and irreducible difference. Entropy here becomes more
than a metaphor: literature does not simply appropriate the idea of entropy
to express the nature of certain cultural or social phenomena; instead, it is
itself caught up in the very dynamics of entropy, and therefore constantly
manifests, produces, or arrests those same phenomena.
For Eric Zencey, entropy acts as a “root metaphor” in the sense given to
the term by Stephen Pepper in World Hypotheses (1942). Zencey identifies
several ways in which the picture of flows of energy given to us by thermodynamics is taken up across the disciplines – biology, psychology, history,
economic theory – and particularly how it comes to shape a view of the
universe as an “incipient chaos” in which we live “in a state of ontological anomie.”77 As John Bruni observes, the earliest treatments of entropy in literature, such as that of H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895), “tended to restage images of exhaustion” present in the work of Flaubert and Baudelaire.78
In New Wave fiction, entropy is often used as a metaphor for cultural and
social decline in an ultra-urbanized, war-mongering, high technology world.
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Entropy is a recurrent motif in Moorcock’s novels, and particularly in the
Jerry Cornelius series; it is often associated with the dissipation of identity
and memory. Cornelius fails in his mission to combat the forces of decay
and entropy, becoming caught up in them instead. In Ballard’s catastrophic
worlds, the dissolution of identity results in a merging of the subject and the
environment around him, in which the oppositions we normally use to order
experience – internal and external, subject and object, mental and physical
– are thoroughly dismantled. This movement from tension to dissipation,
towards maximum entropy, is central to Ballard’s apocalyptic vision.
That the future promises not progress but stasis, and the end of genuine
difference and innovation, is an idea pursued with equal vigour by many
theorists of the postmodern. In the commodification of newness in postmodern culture Jameson observes a paradox, which is “the equivalence
between an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and
an unparalleled standardization of everything.”79 Jameson employs a lexicon
shared with the science of entropy and thermodynamics when he describes
the manner in which “the supreme value of the New and of innovation, as
both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady
stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable
and motionless,” leaving “the realization that no society has ever been so
standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social, and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogeneously.”80 The temporality
that structured modernization has been replaced with “an appearance of
random changes that are mere stasis, a disorder after the end of history.”81
Pynchon, who acknowledges his debt to the metaphorical use of entropy
by Henry Adams and Norbert Wiener, 82 draws in “Entropy” – and in other
texts – on their understanding of entropy as heat-death and exhaustion. The
world of “Entropy” appears at times to be full of activity and complexity (“a
stretto passage in the year’s fugue”) and at others to be listless and directionless, characterized by “private meanderings” and “aimless loves.”83 But
it is set on a course of entropy, until such point as the moment of equilibrium is reached and heat-transfer becomes impossible, with the temperature
reaching a steady and stable 37 degrees Fahrenheit and effecting “the final
absence of all motion” in a perpetual state of limbo. 84 This elimination of
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difference in the physical world evokes the more general social and cultural
torpor produced by American consumerism which, as Callisto states, enacts
“a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation
to sameness.”85
The homogenizing forces of consumerism and mediatization are also, as
we will see, figured as entropic in Cohen’s fiction. However, Cohen’s understanding of entropy owes much more to the re-reading of the second law of
thermodynamics presented in Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? (1944) and
Mind and Matter (1958), and Ilya Prigogine’s work on dissipative structures,
published in texts such as Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature
(1984) and The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature
(1997, both written with Isabelle Stengers). Schrödinger argues that life is
constantly re-energized by using resources from outside, exporting entropy
or importing “negative entropy” (or “free energy”) to produce a higher order
from disorder. This does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics
– that entropy and disorder increase in a closed system – precisely because
the universe is not a closed system. This is the key distinction that allows
Cohen to borrow entropy as a model, not only on occasion to suggest the
sense of exhaustion with which it is associated in most anglophone fiction,
but also, and more insistently, to posit an endlessly renewable production
of difference. Indeed, the very instability of metaphors such as entropy in
Cohen’s fiction becomes one of several techniques through which literature
may introduce uncertainty and generate the kind of heterogeneity that combats the very process of entropy.
The etymology of entropy (from the Greek “tropos,” meaning transformation or turning) already suggests transformations of the kind effected
by metaphor as a literary trope. Many of the narratives of Cohen’s El fin de
lo mismo discussed below do not simply appropriate entropy as a trope for
certain social, economic, or cultural phenomena but exploit the tautology of
this operation to explore what the processes of entropy can reveal about the
nature of metaphor itself. In his literary and critical work, Cohen develops
a theory of metaphor that dispenses with Platonic divisions and hierarchies
and draws instead on models of multiplicity and metamorphosis developed
in recent scientific and philosophical thought. Along the way, as we will see,
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he constructs a role for the critic in an immanent, rhizomatic world of continual becoming that has nothing to do with the traditional explication or
exegesis of texts.
Becoming-inhuman in “Lydia en el canal”
He counted the materials of the landscape: the curvilinear
perspectives of the concrete causeways, the symmetry of car
fenders, the contours of Karen’s thighs and pelvis, her uncertain smile. What new algebra would make sense of these elements?—J. G. Ballard86
The protagonist of Cohen’s “Lydia en el canal” experiences an intensely
chaotic relationship with the physical architecture of her world. She fails
to tame the strange geometry of the new apartment to which she has been
transferred on becoming a widow: its volumes, surfaces, reflections, and angles “no se unían con el cuerpo en un sistema duradero” (did not join with the
body in a durable system). 87 This experience is associated with bereavement:
Lydia feels that the presence of another body – that of her husband, for
whom she is grieving – would be needed to conquer this unfamiliar territory.
Objects change form, harden and threaten to collapse on top of her, in what
appears to be an extension of an inner discord between body and thought: at
one point, Lydia’s body is described as fleeing from her and disintegrating,
while, at another, it is her untamed thought that escapes and spins with such
violence that the floor gives way and a centrifugal force crushes her against
the wall.
“Lydia en el canal” establishes an important dialogue with Ballard’s The
Atrocity Exhibition (1970), the first novel Cohen translated into Spanish. 88
The apartment sex scenes between Lydia and Tranco strongly echo those between Tallis and Karen Novotny in Ballard’s novel. Tallis and Karen watch
each other’s bodies interact with the angles and surfaces of the apartment,
and “the sexual act between them was a dual communion between themselves and the continuum of time and space which they occupied.”89 The “act
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of love” for them becomes “a vector in an applied geometry.”90 With a similar
consciousness of geometrical confusion and (dis)harmony, Lydia is shaken
by “las inestables alianzas del espacio, la fugacidad de sus cuplas” (the unstable alliances of space, the fleetingness of its bonds)91 but finds brief respite
during intercourse with her neighbour Tranco, watching how “alrededor de
los dos cuerpos, la turba de objetos de la pieza se ordena en un pachorriento
mandala” (around the two bodies, the mob of objects in the room ordered
itself into a calm mandala).92
“Lydia en el canal” exemplifies the unstable, chaotic realms of Cohen’s
narrative worlds. Caught up in unpredictable forces, his characters struggle
and usually fail to impose any order on the continually transforming matter and energy of the universe. Lydia’s predicament is also similar to the
peculiar condition suffered by Aubade in Pynchon’s “Entropy,” in which all
perceptions of the world around her are experienced as sound, a discordant
cacophony from which fragments of more ordered and harmonious music
emerge. She has a heightened sense of the continual battle between order
and disorder that governs the world around her and struggles to order and
reorder the perceptual information she receives, to keep formlessness and
meaninglessness at bay:
The architectonic purity of her world was constantly threatened
by such hints of anarchy: gaps and excrescences and skew lines,
and a shifting or tilting of planes to which she had continually
to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and meaningless signals. […]
That precious signal-to-noise ratio, whose delicate balance
required every calorie of her strength, seesawed inside the small
tenuous skull […].93
However, if Aubade is ultimately powerless to prevent the resolution of these
tensions into an irreversible stasis, the geometric and atmospheric anomalies
of Cohen’s worlds often present a means of liberation for his protagonists.
Unlike Aubade, his characters often learn to come to terms with their
frightening, unhomely environments, and to understand that they form part
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of the constant flux of these, not positioned above or beyond them. The moment of epiphany that reveals to them their shared nature with the universe
gives them a particular sense of meaning and destiny.
Indeed, Lydia’s coming-to-terms with the world around her, her passage
through grief to a renewed sense of belonging in an alien landscape, is not
achieved by means of shoring up her individual identity or reestablishing the
boundaries of her self, but through an embrace of the interconnectedness of
all things, herself included. Smoking a cigarette by the canal, she observes
that “las hilachas del humo parecían anudar síntomas dispersos” (the loose
threads of smoke seemed to tie scattered signs together):94 they link together
the greasy reflections of the water, the moss on the sunken barges, the angles
of plexiglass, and the blackened columns of the bridge, and all of these with
herself, as she takes another drag and feels the smoke at the back of her
throat. Focussing on another image, that of a virus, she meditates on the
“communion” that brings together bodies invaded by viral cells, including
her own.95 This revelation is part of the process that leads to a possible integration for Lydia in the unhomely environment in which she finds herself.
Of the stories collected in El fin de lo mismo, “Lydia en el canal” most
closely follows Ballard in the psychopathological origin of the unusual couplings between characters and the urban landscape. In The Atrocity Exhibition,
insistent references to the merging of the contours of human bodies with
the geometries of concrete overpasses and underpasses and multistorey car
parks are clearly associated with the protagonist’s narrative perspective, and
Dr. Nathan finds that he is suffering from a specific condition, a “perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated
mass.”96 Lydia’s experience of disorder in the physical environment and of
repeated transgressions of the boundaries separating subject and object are,
if not linked with a complicated version of sadism as in the case of Ballard’s
protagonist, clearly the result of intense grief, and the symptoms abate as she
gradually begins to come to terms with her loss.
However, Cohen parts company with Ballard on a very significant point.
In The Atrocity Exhibition, we are led to understand that Travis’s distorted
perspective is the result of over-exposure to the traumas of technological
warfare and the most inhuman traits of the post-Vietnam era. It is a reaction,
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Dr. Nathan suggests, against the natural order, perhaps partly attributable
to the power of thermonuclear weapons “in bringing about the total fusion
and non-differentiation of all matter.”97 Travis therefore reacts against “the
phenomenology of the universe, the specific and independent existence of
separate objects and events.”98 Cohen reverses this association: it is instead
the natural world in which all matter is fused or interrelated, and his characters attain their highest point of sanity when they recognize their oneness
with the universe, not the supposed independence of subjects, objects, and
events.
That we should not understand this “natural” world to exclude technology, however, is made clear from the particular forms of “becoming”
Cohen narrates, and the language used to express these transformations.
Pynchon pursues a musical analogy throughout “Entropy” to suggest a delicate balance between form and chaos, meaning and noise, modulation and
resolution, and the complex relationship Aubade conceives with the tensions
between these in the world around her. Cohen’s story, in comparison, is more
radical in its use of style to suggest this tension and the transference and negotiation of agency between subject and object. An insistent use of transitive
verbs ascribes intentions, desires, and emotions to the objects around Lydia
to the extent that her keys and clothes often seem to be more alive than she
does and to have a greater sense of conscious, purposeful activity. It is a technique that Cohen would put to much more extensive use in his novel Casa de
Ottro (2009), which explores zones of indiscernibility and exchange between
human subjects and inanimate objects and conveys something of the forms
of becoming that Deleuze and Guattari have described as “becoming-molecular” or “becoming-inhuman.”99
While Deleuze and Guattari favour the use of free indirect discourse in
literature to express the nature of language as a “collective assemblage”100 –
used extensively in the work of Woolf and Joyce, for example – this technique
is conspicuously absent in Cohen. Cohen’s own expression of dispersed subjectivity and the nature of language and discourse as “collective assemblages”
is most strikingly to be found in a conceit employed in many of his novels
and short stories, the “Panconciencia.” A kind of virtual information network that allows users to access other citizens’ minds, the Panconciencia is
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a trope for the flows of perception and experience across the boundaries of
the subject. Connecting up, the narrator of Donde yo no estaba (2006) hears
a murmur in crescendo, “el vocerío del multiverso interior” (the clamour of
the interior multiverse) and understands that “Mi historia personal ya no
era cosa solitaria” (my personal life was no longer a solitary thing).101 The
Panconciencia invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that “Language in
its entirety is indirect discourse,” and that “Direct discourse is a detached
fragment of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective
assemblage; but the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from
which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not,
from which I draw my voice.”102
Cohen’s Panconciencia conceit imagines a (virtual) technological interface that mediates these intersubjective flows. As in Piglia’s fiction, technology here is neither antagonistic towards the human nor a substitution
for it. Indeed, “becoming-inhuman” seems to play a vital role in preparing
human subjects for an encounter with each other. As is clearly the case in
“Lydia en el canal,” a process of becoming-other with inanimate objects or
non-human organisms makes it possible for Cohen’s characters to break out
of their isolation and discover a sense of proximity with other humans. In
Casa de Ottro, Fronda’s gradual understanding that life flows through the
objects around her as well as herself leads to a renewal of her relationship
with both the cyborg and human inhabitants of the house; likewise, as we
will see, an encounter with the sea’s cycles of preservation and destruction
brings the protagonist of “La ilusión monarca” to desire communication with
his fellow prisoners. Lydia, gradually coming to terms with the sharp angles
and aggressive intrusions of her material environment, eventually understands that her self-exclusion from it and from the community of peculiar
and rather menacing youths around her will only lead to greater danger and
misery, and she begins to interact compassionately with them. “No se puede
ser condesa a cien yardas de un carruaje” (you can’t be a countess a hundred
yards from a carriage),103 she repeats to herself. She realizes that her destiny
is here and that, if she shares their space, she is also part of them. In contrast
to Ballard’s fiction, the merging of the human with the inhuman in Cohen’s,
while it may be symptomatic of trauma or produce a traumatic experience
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itself, nevertheless precedes a transformation in which the human becomes
more fully human. As in Deleuze’s vision, “The human becomes more than
itself, or expands to its highest power, not by affirming its humanity, nor by
returning to animal state, but by becoming-hybrid with what is not itself.”104
Cohen’s fiction marks a significant departure from the novels of Pynchon,
Burroughs, and Moorcock in its treatment of dispersed subjectivities. In the
latter three, the dissipation of identity and the increasing erosion of difference between human subjects and their environment are associated with the
effects of trauma or an inexorable slide towards entropy, numbness, and stasis. In Cohen, by contrast, human subjects find their home in the chaotic flux
that binds together the natural and artificial elements of their environment.
This reversal lays the ground, as I will show, for Cohen’s resignification of
entropy as a mechanism to produce difference and creative conflict rather
than sameness and the depletion of energy.
Entropy and dissipative structures in “El fin de lo mismo”
The chaotic and disordered geometries of “Lydia en el canal” are resignified
in other stories of El fin de lo mismo as a source of creativity and resistance
to the homogenizing effects of capitalism. “El fin de lo mismo,” the title story of the collection, imagines a world that is highly unstable and subject to
extreme hyperinflation. Bodies, goods, and money are caught up in a frenzied circulation in which the rate of exchange rockets daily, generating such
uncertainty and panic that “El tejido del progreso se deshilachaba, pinchado
por las navajas de los hambrientos, roído por la vehemencia disciplinaria de
los profesionales inseguros” (the fabric of progress was fraying, pierced by the
knives of the hungry, eaten away by the disciplining vehemence of insecure
professionals).105 Even the physical world is affected, the river misshapen,
cracks and protuberances appearing in the sky. Tensions are exacerbated by
the heat of the summer, a constant 37 degrees in the shade (the reference to
Pynchon’s “Entropy” cannot be accidental). “Tanto desarreglo podría haber
resultado en un gran alumbramiento” (this much disorder could have resulted in a great birth), Cohen’s narrator observes,106 articulating the insight
– proper to theories of complexity and emergence – that disorder is always
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an opportunity for a system to reorganize itself at a higher level. But instead,
the vertigo induced by inflation robs Gumpes and his fellow citizens of their
energy and restricts them to progressively more cramped spaces, as they have
to downsize to smaller and shabbier apartments.
In such circumstances, can they be blamed for swapping uncertainty
for stability, even if it comes at the price of homogenization, stasis, and the
incursion of the authorities into their private lives? To arrest this inevitable
drift towards entropy comes Olga, a woman with three arms. With her
“torso de disonancia perfecta” (torso of perfect dissonance),107 Gumpes considers Olga to be “la guardiana de la inestabilidad” (the guardian of instability) and therefore worthy of his love in a world that threatens to eliminate
all difference and fizzle out into numbness.108 However, an unexpected twist
sees Olga propelled into sudden fame in a spate of interviews and magazine
covers; as Miguel Dalmaroni observes, the scandal of her third arm is effectively defused by the mass media, which swallows up all possible anomalies
into itself.109 The power of dissonance is neutralized, as the forces of entropy
flatten out difference and everything tends towards sameness.
When entropy comes as predicted, however, it is not the cataclysmic
heat-death of the universe but merely a gentle adjustment in the atmosphere:
the water stagnates a little more in the backwaters of the river, April is perhaps a little less fresh than usual, and business and consumption slow down.
This state of entropy is for Cohen not the end, but merely a passing stage:
what no one had foreseen, we are told, “es que la entropía es desorden; y
que, al calor de los escombros del progreso, la ciudad ya incubaba nuevas
alteraciones, anomalías brutales y asombrosas;” (is that entropy is disorder;
and that, in the heat of the ashes of progress, the city was already incubating new disturbances, surprising and brutal anomalies).110 This is simply a
stage of relative calm and rest before new divergences and disruptions arise
to challenge the somnolence of the status quo. For this reason my reading
of the story would not trace a move from the fantastic to the realistic as
definitively as Dalmaroni’s does: Cohen leaves us with the full expectation
that new anomalies are about to emerge.
Disorder for Cohen always signals the possibility of re-organization
at a more complex level, a state of potential creativity and energy; his
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sophisticated grasp on the implications of thermodynamics and information theory allows him to unshackle the entropy metaphor from its more
commonly apocalyptic use in Pynchon and Ballard. Along with uncertainty,
chaos, emergence, and dissipative structures, entropy is one of the scientific
tropes Cohen draws upon in his construction of a theory of “realismo inseguro” (unstable realism), which describes a series of aesthetic strategies
suited to the “realistic” portrayal of a complex, emergent, ever-evolving universe. He introduces these theories not simply to reflect on the nature of
the physical world in which we live or the narratives we construct about it
– chaos “como mito de la época” (as a myth of our time), for example – but
insistently “como hipótesis de trabajo para las invenciones de la literatura”
(as a working hypothesis for the inventions of literature).111
The key element of this hypothesis rests on the notion of the creativity
and energy available in dissipative structures, which make use of chaotic
processes and flows across their borders to produce new kinds of order. In
a universe far from equilibrium, Prigogine maintains, the operation of such
systems “leads to new collective effects and to a new coherence.”112 Drawing
on Prigogine’s understanding, Cohen distinguishes between “la novela
agónica” (the dying novel), which attends to the apathy of its mass audience,
and “las narraciones de lo real incierto” (narratives of the uncertain real):
while the former represents the lukewarm universe of entropy, he claims,
the latter are “estructuras caóticas alejadas del equilibrio. Son incendios,
son oleajes” (chaotic structures that are far from equilibrium. They are fires,
waves).113 Flames and waves are prime examples of turbulent and chaotic
processes that defy the homogenizing effects of entropy. Both are favoured
images in Michel Serres’s quest – highly relevant to Cohen’s own, as will
become clear – to “think a new object, multiple in space and mobile in time,
unstable and fluctuating like a flame, relational.”114
As Cohen observes, if dissipation suggests chaos and dissolution, the
opposite of structure, herein lies the central paradox of Prigogine’s vision:
a dissipative structure is able to maintain stability precisely by constantly
opening itself up to flows from the environment, as “se autoorganiza, se realimenta en contacto con agentes aleatorios y se transforma por bifurcación,
amplificación y acoplamiento. Cada turbulencia genera nuevos órdenes” (it
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self-organizes, it feeds off aleatory agents and transforms itself by bifurcation, amplification, and connection. Each instance of turbulence generates
new orders).115 In Cohen’s work, this becomes a picture of how literature may
generate new forms and ideas through an encounter with difference and the
unpredictable. Elsewhere, he proposes that good technique in short-story
writing should involve dealing with “lo improcedente, lo intempestivo, lo
superfluo y lo que otras técnicas desechan” (the improper, the untimely, the
superfluous and whatever is rejected by other techniques).116 The economical and measured in style, the concise, and the clear: these are impositions
of form that cannot remain open to the unexpected or the excessive and
cannot therefore create new orders or produce new visions. Instead, Cohen’s
strategy in the narratives that make up El fin de lo mismo – together with
many of his other texts – responds to what he understands to be the task
of literature: “incorporar el caos a la forma sin disfrazarlo de otra cosa” (to
incorporate chaos within form without disguising it as something else).117
Cohen’s less apocalyptic understanding of entropy leads to a resignification of the breakdown of the subject/object division that characterizes most
fiction on the theme. As we saw in “Lydia en el canal,” the dissolving of the
self does not connote a loss of identity but its rediscovery, a consciousness of
the true nature of subjectivity as dispersed within the complex system of the
universe it inhabits. The integrity of the subject is violated and transversed
by external forces, but this does not eradicate agency: this is clearly the case
in “El fin de lo mismo,” as Olga’s assymetric body causes a radical dislocation
in the physical structures and objects around her, unbalancing the system’s
gradients and introducing an instability that momentarily re-energizes it
and decreases entropy. This (rare) ability of individuals to arrest entropy
by introducing dissent and resisting homogenization again marks Cohen’s
vision as more optimistic than Ballard’s. As open systems rather than closed
ones, the worlds of Cohen’s fiction thrive on the disorder produced by entropic forces, which submit the status quo to constant transformation and
reorganization.
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Resonance in “Aspectos de la vida de Enzatti”
The characteristics of “realismo inseguro” are very much in evidence in
“Aspectos de la vida de Enzatti,” another narrative from El fin de lo mismo,
in which Cohen draws on the physics of acoustics to create a picture of literature’s construction of meaning through resonance, rather than reference.
An extended exploration of the relationship between sound and harmonics
directly links Cohen’s interest in dispersed subjectivity with the textual
practice of “realismo inseguro.”
Lying in bed, Enzatti believes that the “system” of the night, with its
“armonías equívocas” (ambiguous harmonies), depends on his remaining at
the centre of it, articulating it.118 As he sits up, he is keenly aware that he has
altered the balance of the system; however, he is also subject to its “fuerzas
mañosas, arbitrarias” (crafty, arbitrary forces). He and the night are part
of a single system whose elements co-interact and co-evolve, shaping each
other: if at first it is the silence of the night that is fractured, it soon becomes
Enzatti who is full of “rajaduras” (cracks).119 Enzatti has been woken by a
shout that pierces the night air and draws him into the street, searching for
its source. The many vibrations and resonances set into play by the production of sound become a means in this story to reflect more generally on the
invisible connections and forces that link subjects and objects across time
and space in a complex system in which every alteration has an effect on
multiple networks. This sense of the intangibility of the forces that hold a
system in tension and produce form is reinforced by references in the text to
magnetic fields.
Every sound, Cohen’s narrator explains, creates secondary vibrations,
or harmonics; never pure or singular, “un sonido es él y el racimo de sonidos
simultáneos que arrastra o desencadena. Eso dice la física” (a sound is itself
and the cluster of simultaneous sounds that it carries with it or triggers.
That’s what physics says). In a more poetic vein, Cohen describes the complex interaction between fundamental notes and overtones in terms that ascribe agency to objects and forces in preference to human subjects: “El grito
surca el cráneo y los armónicos se expanden, se arremolinan, chocando con
cosas dormidas que, obnubiladas, se alzan a la vigilia tintineando” (the shout
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cuts through the skull and the harmonics expand, whirl around, colliding
with dormant objects which, befuddled, rise jingling into wakefulness).120
Neither can the listener remain inert or a passive witness to this frenzy of
frequencies: Enzatti too is caught up in the system of vibrations that traverse
his body and that he alters as well as receives. The sound of the shout echoes
impossibly, fantastically, until everything seems to be drawn into the “revolution” it has unleashed.121
If the shout traverses space to construct a web of multiple connections in
the present, it also assembles “un revuelo de sonidos antiguos” (a tumult of
old sounds) in Enzatti’s head.122 The main thread of “Aspectos de la vida de
Enzatti” is interrupted by four sections that recount previous episodes in his
life at different ages. The form of the narrative has an aleatory feel: the interspersed sections are not clearly related to each other or to the main “plot,”
although certain points of resonance may be discernible. In many of them
Enzatti experiences a sense of the transience of time and the provisionality
of the material, together with a disconnection with the world around him,
alternating with the sudden revelation of connections and coincidences not
previously seen.
In the section entitled “31 años,” for example, the improbability that
Enzatti’s only surviving parent will regain consciousness cuts him loose into
the world: “caminaba suelto, como supurado por el mundo, sin origen ni explicación” (he walked alone, as if oozing from the world, without origin or
explanation).123 Leaving behind the “visiones desunidas” (disunited visions)
of limbs, machinery, and syringes in the hospital,124 Enzatti meditates on
a contrasting image of unification – the surface shine of a wine glass in a
nearby bar, which brings together a miscellany of people and objects in its
reflection – and notices that “sobre el vidrio convexo se acumulaban sin
disputas las partes de ese mundo suspendido, el bar y zonas de la calle”
(amassing themselves on the convex glass, without quarrelling, were all the
parts of that suspended world, the bar and areas of the street).125 “29 años”
relates the temporary and unexplained disappearance from sight of Enzatti’s
girlfriend, who remains present to the touch of his arm around her shoulder
as they walk down the street but becomes invisible, only to rematerialize a
few moments later; this leads him to wonder to what extent the “essence” of
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Annabel resides in substance or something more intangible, and to glimpse
the importance of the immaterial bonds that unite them, while reassuring
himself of her bodily presence. In “36 años,” in contrast, Enzatti is surprised,
looking back at steps leading to a balcony on a street, that they look exactly
the same as they had done less than a minute earlier. This impression of
the stubborn durability of things is itself transitory, however, and he writes
an elegy to the moment, which has now gone; and yet he keeps the poem
safe, hoping that in the future he will discover it again and feel some form
of continuity and inexorability, “una anomalía persistente, irremediable” (a
persistent, irreparable anomaly).126
While these “flashbacks” have no explanatory function within the diegesis, their presence testifies to the rich, divergent, multiple, and unpredictable nature of the connections that unite sensations and experiences across
time as well as space. They are linked by references to events or impressions
as “arbitrario” (arbitrary),127 “aleatorio” (aleatory),128 and “gratuita” (gratuitous).129 Placed within the main narrative, their overall effect is to produce a
sense of the radical reorientation of perception, to question or sever the continuities and connections we take for granted – such as the persistence of a
person’s identity over time – and to establish new or surprising associations
not obvious to the eye.
Resonance, then, becomes, not simply a picture of the intrinsic connectedness of things, the vibrations that can trigger change even in far-flung
corners of a system, but a mode of literary construction. It is one that leads
away from realism’s hierarchy of referent and representation and towards
what Cohen calls “Un arte de superficies” (an art of surfaces): a plane of
immanence. This does not refer, as he hastens to point out, to an art that is
in any way superficial, but “un arte que se hace ahí donde todos los efectos
lindan con las cosas y el lenguaje, y resuenan unos en otros. Es dispersivo,
porque tiene una ilimitada capacidad de relación” (an art made at the point
where all effects adjoin things and language, and each echoes in each. It is
dispersive, because it has an unlimited capacity for relationality).130
Cohen cites Rupert Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields and morphic resonance in defining this field as one of relations rather than material
objects. Sheldrake, a former biochemist, has since worked largely in the
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field of parapsychology; his major theories have been dismissed by mainstream scientists. Much of his work has been written in response to what he
perceives as the limitations of the mechanistic approach to developmental
biology. According to his hypothesis of “formative causation,” each kind of
cell or organism has a “morphogenetic field” that shapes their development,
representing “a kind of pooled or collective memory of the species”: “Thus a
developing foxglove seedling, for example, is subject to morphic resonance
from countless foxgloves that came before, and this resonance shapes and
stabilizes its morphogenetic fields.”131 Although no evidence for the existence of such fields has been found, Cohen takes inspiration from Sheldrake’s
insistence that “La materia ya no constituye un principio de explicación fundamental, mientras que los campos y la energía sí” (matter no longer constitutes a fundamental explanatory principle, while fields and energy do).132
He finds that “Morfogénesis es una palabra adecuada a la manera en que
los relatos resuenan entre sí y entre ellos y el mundo” (morphogenesis is an
accurate word to describe the way stories resonate with each other and with
the world).133
While Sheldrake’s morphic resonance takes place between very similar
organisms, Cohen’s version is deliberately less selective in its reach, bringing
into relationship objects that may otherwise be dissimilar and disconnected
to form a picture of multiplicity and complexity rather than unification and
simplicity. Enzatti understands that if the shout – real and human, rather
than imagined – has called him, “no es para instalarlo en la claridad sino
presentarle diversas formas del enigma” (it is not to settle him in clarity but
to present him with different forms of the enigma).134 For this reason, perhaps, we are told that the vibrations caused by the shout continue long after
Enzatti has rescued its author, a man who has fallen through the floor of
a garage. As he departs from the scene, “Sonidos díscolos chocan entre sí,
confundidos” (unruly sounds collide with each other, confused), and Enzatti
realizes that the most important thing is that they should not be silenced
through any kind of clarification.135 This confusion is part of an encounter
with the unknown. As he reflects, “Lo que zumba en el cráneo de Enzatti
y lo conmueve, y lo debilita, no es solamente lo olvidado que regresa. Es
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lo desconocido” (that which buzzes in Enzatti’s skull and moves him, and
weakens him, is not merely the forgotten returning. It is the unknown).136
In place of the finished, the rounded, and the neatly explained, Cohen’s
“realismo inseguro” chooses to deal in “los excursos, los tiempos muertos,
las descripciones impertinentes, las analogías, las referencias múltiples y el
poder transformador de la resonancia” (excursions, dead time, irrelevant
descriptions, analogies, multiple references, and the transforming power of
resonance) in search of “un ámbito donde el suceso hace fulgurar todos los
niveles de la realidad y todas las realidades” (a field in which the spark of an
event causes all levels of reality and all realities to light up).137 The “site” of
resonance, Cohen explains, is the metaphor:
La metáfora vincula entidades de diversa especie creando
entidades distintas de los términos vinculados: es la contigüidad entre realidad material e imaginación, el lugar donde el
acontecimiento se cuenta mejor. Es el motor privilegiado de
la autogeneración del texto-mundo. Es la forma proliferante,
el “sostén” de la estructura difusiva; reúne pero no encierra.
Estructuras difusivas, campos de resonancia donde los acontecimientos se relacionan en paralelo y lo que parece agotarse
en una causa siempre se realimenta con una relación más, son
las novelas de Thomas Pynchon, pero también, por ejemplo, las
de Julien Gracq.138
The metaphor links entities of different kinds, creating different entities from the terms it links: it is the contiguity between
material reality and imagination, the place where the event is
best recounted. It is the principal engine for the self-generation
of the text-world. It is the proliferating form, the “support” for
a diffusive structure; it brings together but it does not enclose.
Dissipative structures, fields of resonance where events relate
to each other alongside each other, and what seems to be fully
exhausted by one cause is always re-energized by another set of
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relations: that is what Thomas Pynchon’s novels are about, but
also, for example, Julien Gracq’s.
If “Aspectos de la vida de Enzatti” gives us a glimpse of this world, in which
new links and pathways are constantly being traced across a field of resonance, two other narratives in El fin de lo mismo take up the task of modelling in greater detail how these particular metaphors of resonance and
dissipative structures can be used to account for creativity in literature and
literature’s role in destabilizing the ruling social order.
Realismo inseguro in “Volubilidad”
Writing has no other end than to lose one’s face.—Gilles
Deleuze139
In “Volubilidad” we move into a more explicitly reflexive realm, in which
Cohen’s vision of a world held in tension between the forces of entropy and
those of self-organization, the tension between formlessness and form, becomes an allegory: not just for the relationship between sociopolitical power
and resistance (as in “El fin de lo mismo”), but also for the role of literature
in contemporary society. The story’s protagonist, Maguire, suspects himself
to be the subject of the fantasies of a fellow-passenger on the subway train
he takes to work every morning. These fantasies take the form of projections
of Maguire performing a wide variety of different jobs: window-cleaner,
magician, waiter, taekwondo instructor, and many more. Over time, these
projections multiply until they are an almost constant presence in his life. It
appears at least possible that they have been instigated by the state-owned
“Oficina Intersubjetiva” (Intersubjective Office) in order to exacerbate
Maguire’s already rather provisional and shifting sense of personal identity
and to frighten him into making “un esfuerzo de cohesión” (an effort towards cohesion).140
In this society’s current and paradoxical phase of post-industrial growth,
the greatest socioeconomic advance is available to citizens who stay put in
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one place; those who have a tendency to move about, to avoid tying themselves to a single point, get left behind. This is an environment in which fixity,
solidity, and clarity are valued: the more easily identifiable an object or a person, the greater the likelihood of their continued existence in social reality.
By contrast, the versatile, fickle, or unstable – those of “carácter disperso”
(a dispersed nature)141 – do not bind themselves so fully to career ambition
and socioeconomic ascent and therefore do not contribute so obviously to
economic growth; labelled “indefinidos sociales” (social indefinites), these
marginal figures are subject to a series of measures taken by the state to
force them to acquire greater cohesion as subjects and to re-enter consumer
society. Once settled back into the system, the “derroche de energía” (waste
of energy)142 they had represented can be channelled more efficiently towards
productive ends.
If the imprecise, the undefined, and the redundant are not so easily
caught up into the inexorable cycle of production and consumption, then
it is their proliferation that becomes the business of literature. In a society
in which almost absolute power is wielded by a sinister coalition between
politics and information, the role of literature is to introduce noise, from
which alternatives might arise. The accelerating post-industrial growth experienced by the societies of El fin de lo mismo produces certain reading preferences among their populations that might remind us of those of the mass
market in our own society. In “Volubilidad,” Cohen introduces a reflexive
commentary into the narrative, exploring the question of which aspects of
the story would fulfil those mainstream narrative expectations and which
would not. For example, after his encounter with the social worker, Maguire
takes a series of actions that appear to show his willingness to reintegrate
into the socioeconomic sphere. However, a heavy note of irony is introduced
by inserting a metafictional observation before the list of his next moves:
“En un marco narrativo apto para el agitado ocio posindustrial, los pasos
que Maguire da a continuación resultan satisfactorios y coherentes” (within
a narrative framework suited to the hectic leisure-time of postindustrial society, the steps Maguire then takes prove to be satisfactory and coherent).143
And indeed, Maguire soon abandons this pretence of social conformity.
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If the mass market demands plots that demonstrate clear causality, with
all ends neatly tied up, it also demands characters that are easily identified
and categorizable. Like many of Cohen’s characters, Maguire is simultaneously more than and less than an individual. His multiple selves add up
to something that is paradoxically much less than a person, often emotionally blank or unreactive. As he practises the same invasive technique of
fantasy-projection on his ex-girlfriend and star television newsreader, who
initially stands firm against his attempts to disperse her identity, we are
told that “un nuevo desvío traicionó entonces las expectativas que el lector
posindustrial habría puesto en su historia. Y es que Maguire no estaba decepcionado. Maguire no estaba nada” (a new change of course then betrayed
the hopes the postindustrial reader had placed in his story. And that was
that Maguire wasn’t disappointed. Maguire wasn’t anything).144
A little later, another comment contrasts the value of predictability in
mass-market narrative with the more creative role chance plays in genuine
imagination. The expectations of the postindustrial reading public are met
by chains of events that are entirely foreseeable; “No obstante Maguire, también lector de su historia, descubrirá pronto que a la imaginación le encanta
el azar. O, lo que es parecido, que el gran público no va a interesarse por su
historia” (nevertheless, Maguire, also a reader of his own story, will soon discover that imagination loves chance. Or, which amounts to the same thing,
that the general public is not going to be interested in his story).145 Meaning
and narrative drive in “Volubilidad” are consistently shaken by events that
may (or may not) be accidental or coincidental. The unexpected appearance
in Maguire’s hostel of the fellow-passenger he suspects to be responsible
for the projections does not contravene the conventions of realist fiction:
such narrative “coincidences” often shape the plot of detective stories, for
example. But the passenger is accompanied by another girl he recognizes
from the same train carriage, and Maguire considers that “la casualidad que
los enfrentaba había añadido innecesariamente a la chica” (the coincidence
that brought them together had unnecessarily added the girl).146
Cohen’s narrative thus provides a metacommentary on the differences
between his own fiction and that of the mass market, demonstrating his allegiance to the techniques of “la narración de lo real incierto” (the narration
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of the uncertain real), which “no cree en las virtudes indispensables del
acabado, la redondez, los cabos atados, las coincidencias explicadas, los
motivos desvelados, los proyectos nítidamente cumplidos o frustrados, las
causas exhaustivas, ni en la flaca gratificación del desenlace” (does not believe
in the indispensable virtues of the finished, roundness, all the ends tied up,
coincidences explained, motives revealed, projects neatly fulfilled or frustrated, causes comprehensively listed, nor in the thin satisfaction of the final
dénouement).147 Just as Maguire’s capacity to “disgregarse” (disintegrate)
becomes a measure of his resistance to society’s definition of progress,148 so
we are asked to understand the instabilities and divergences of Cohen’s own
narrative as a sign of its critical distance from, and challenge to, dominant
social and cultural discourses.
In some respects, this sounds rather like a typical postmodern resort to
textual indeterminacy as the key to disarticulating discourses of authority:
if everything is a text, then language is the only battleground and the play
of signification the only weapon against monologic discourse. However, if
Cohen’s texts are freed from the imposition of unitary meaning, this is not
via a Foucauldian-Barthesian “death of the author,” in which signification
is severed from authorial control and becomes endlessly deferred. Cohen’s
authors and narrators do not disappear from their texts but disperse into
them, in a way that produces new encounters. The multiple, composite nature of the self does not occasion a postmodern crisis of representation but
becomes a starting-point for new forms of knowledge and ways of relating to
the world around.
Maguire’s dispersive identity not only performs an act of political resistance: it also performs a “becoming-other,” or “becoming-multiple,”
which for Deleuze is intrinsic to the act of writing. “Volubilidad” acts as
a precursor to the monumental Donde yo no estaba, a kind of fictionalized
diary/autobiography in a Deleuzean mode and Cohen’s most sustained and
radical treatment of the process of “becoming-other.” The narrator of this
novel is engaged in a personal quest, presented as one of supreme ethical
import, to “despersonalizarse” (depersonalize himself), and to work towards
“el adelgazamiento del ser” (the slimming-down of one’s being). This involves
a recognition that “el yo es una prenda sin contenido” (“I” is a garment with
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nobody inside),149 and the recommended procedure to follow is “ingerir lo
que de sus personas suelten otros, y en el mismo acto evacuar parte de uno”
(to ingest what other people let go of and, at the same time, to evacuate part
of oneself).150
An important difference emerges between this understanding of the
self-transforming process of writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, a
mistrust of writing as a way of imposing meaning on the world (or constructing a world into existence) that often underlies Marxist and psychoanalytical
approaches to literature as well as various schools of ideological criticism
(feminism, postcolonialism, etc.). As Deleuze describes it,
To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on
the matter of lived experience. […] Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed
[…]. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one
becomes-woman, becomes-animal or -vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible.151
Writing therefore involves participating in the multiple acts of becoming
taking place in the world around us and accepting, in Colebrook’s précis,
“the challenge of no longer acting as a separate and selecting point within
the perceived world, but of becoming different with, and through, what is
perceived.”152 This again takes us away from a post-structuralist emphasis
on the situated (if unstable) nature of subjectivity and cultural meaning.
Maguire’s projections, like those of O’Jaral (see Chapter 2), are not impositions of the self onto the other but evidence of the multiple and dispersive
nature of the self. As Deleuze argues, the fabulating function of literature
“does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego.”153 Quite the reverse: it
is a process in which the self becomes other and understands its place in the
flux of becomings of which the world is comprised. Cohen’s distance both
from conventional psychoanalytical or symptomatic approaches to the text,
and from their suspicion of literature as a form of anthropomorphism or
self-projection, is worked out most thoroughly in the remaining narrative of
El fin de lo mismo, “La ilusión monarca.”
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“La ilusión monarca”: metaphors of multiplicity
Of the narratives that comprise El fin de lo mismo, it is “La ilusión monarca”
that demonstrates most clearly the power of metaphor as the “engine” of art,
creating fields of resonance in which meaning is never closed off or exhausted
but continually renewed and re-energized. If “Aspectos de la vida de Enzatti”
theorizes the power of resonance to create unusual topologies, linking disparate elements across time and space, “La ilusión monarca” gives this idea full
expression as a model for literary creation. Cohen’s story assembles a constellation of texts and images, multiply connected in a constantly evolving
galaxy in which any new event flashes and reverberates through the whole,
and those reflections and echoes found in the most distant places return to
spark the original stimulus in a never-ending play of meaning. The sea, the
subject of “La ilusión monarca,” does not simply refer to a mass of water
but to the history of its representation in art and literature, Romantic and
modern. However, Cohen’s narrative takes us far from the usual, rather glib
postmodern celebration of multiplicity and mixture in which all difference
is eventually flattened into sameness and all texts refer to nothing but other
texts. This story, like many others by Cohen, represents instead a serious,
committed attempt to stage an encounter with difference, and to understand
the dynamics of such an encounter and its capacity to engender newness.
The characters of “La ilusión monarca” struggle to attach a meaning to
their existence, living in virtual isolation in a prison built on a beach. The
prisoners are restricted to a confined area comprising a cell block and a section of the beach, flanked with walls reaching far into the sea. They are fed
at intervals through hatches and forbidden to approach the guards, but no
other discipline is exercised on them. In the absence of all societal structures
and conventions, the prisoners form tribal groups for protection and sociability, which engage violently with other groups and with those individuals
who, like the protagonist Sergio, choose to remain on the margins.
The prisoners’ attempt to read meaning into their situation mirrors
our own interpretative efforts as readers and makes them redundant. They
suspect that they have been placed beside the sea as a method of psychological torture, as they are faced daily with a possible escape route that is
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nevertheless extremely risky: nearly all those who attempt to swim their
way to freedom eventually return as corpses washed up by the tide, often
with mysterious wounds. One of the prisoners, Jolxen, seems to confirm the
prisoners’ suspicions that the prison is some form of social experiment by
claiming to be one of its designers, a sociologist contracted by the government to test the effects of anxiety on individuals in a controlled situation.
But it is at least as likely that he is deluded or deceitful; this interpretation
is neither confirmed nor dismissed. Other hypotheses suggested include the
idea that the prison exists to provide a space for the circulation of goods
within the economy.
To these interpretations, the text’s critics have added their own. Annelies
Oeyen, while she acknowledges that the narrative is “un texto ambivalente”
(an ambivalent text), reads it very much in an allegorical key.154 The isolated
prison recalls the concentration camps of the dictatorship, the bodies washed
ashore re-enact the fate of many of the disappeared, and the society both
within and beyond the prison bears the hallmarks of the uncertainties and
new forms of exclusion of Argentina’s neoliberal 1990s.155 This leads Oeyen
quite naturally to a psycho-sociological reading of the story: “Cohen presenta
una fantasía que sirve de catarsis y alivio ante la incertidumbre cotidiana de
la experiencia argentina” (Cohen presents a fantasy that serves as a cathartic
relief from the daily uncertainty of Argentine experience).156 Escape from
the prison is not a question of leaving the country, “sino a través de una salida
hacia sí mismo que devuelve la perdida fe en su entorno” (but through a
journey towards oneself that restores a lost faith in one’s environment): the
response to uncertainty is not emigration but a journey of discovery within
the self that makes it possible to regain trust in the country.157
Although Oeyen’s analysis is perhaps over-zealous in its quest to
anchor the story in a single time and place, the explicit use of the enclosed-world-as-microcosm-of-society device in Cohen’s narrative certainly
opens itself up to any and all interpretations of this kind. Although unnamed, the country in which the prison is located certainly bears resemblances to post-dictatorship Argentina. These are evoked through references
to the failure of the nation to construct a coherent sense of identity for itself,
to the riches of the land and a glorious past now eclipsed by heavy debts,
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and to the dual tendency of the state towards violent disciplinarianism and
the sudden abandonment and neglect of its citizens. The problem is that
these readings are all too consciously invited by the text. Its sheer openness
to multiple metaphorical readings, together with its diegetic concern with
the process of metaphorization itself, undermines the validity of proposing
any one reading, including those suggested in the text itself.
It is the sea, the prisoners’ constant reminder of a possible but perilous
escape route, that acts as the point of condensation for many of the story’s
metaphors. The prisoners ascribe to it myriad and conflicting qualities: “El
mar es un potrillo indeciso. Al mar hay que dominarlo” (the sea is a hesitant
foal. The sea has to be controlled);158 “El mar es una puta remilgada” (the sea
is a fussy whore); or, more puzzlingly, “El mar es un clarinete ortopédico”
(the sea is an orthopaedic clarinet).159 In this way, the sea becomes something
different to each: “El mar es la ilusión monarca, todo le cabe” (the sea is
the monarch of illusions, everything fits into it).160 One is reminded of the
ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), which appears to have no essence
or substance of its own, but instead produces powerful projections of the
characters’ own fears and desires. Closer comparisons with Lem’s ocean will
open up some of the complexities of Cohen’s approach to metaphor in this
narrative.
On one hand, Cohen’s insistence on the utter indifference of the sea
reinforces Lem’s critique of the anthropomorphizing approach that we cannot lay aside in our quest for knowledge, which domesticates the other or
provides a familiar point of reference to increase our understanding of the
unfamiliar (the task of metaphor). The prisoners’ clichéd metaphors bring
them no closer to understanding the radical otherness of the sea:
Por mucho que algunas asombren, todas en el fondo son frases
consabidas, refritos mal logrados de frases ya viejas, que el mar
ni siquiera oye. Con frases como ésas los presos podrían pasarse
siglos sin entender qué pretende el mar de ellos, siempre y cuando pretenda algo.161
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However surprising some of them may sound, they are all in
the end habitual phrases, badly rehashed versions of already
dated phrases, which the sea doesn’t even hear. With phrases
like these, the prisoners could carry on for years without understanding what the sea expects of them, if indeed it expects anything at all.
The sea remains impassive to their existence, imperviously material and
resistant to interpretation. When Sergio swims out to sea, he understands
that “cualquier frase sobre el mar, cualquier cábala es mentira” (every phrase
about the sea, every speculation, is a lie).162 The sea knows nothing of the
prisoners, and if they choose to enter it in the hope of escape, it is because
they need to find a direction to move in: “Así los actos cobran sentido” (that
way, acts gain meaning).163
Thus “La ilusión monarca” demonstrates the delusional nature of anthropomorphizing metaphors and insists on the irreducible materiality of
the sea, which transcends all human attempts to organize it into a coherent narrative and remains totally other to human society. However, unlike
Lem, Cohen is not principally concerned here with the limitations of our
knowledge and our inability to encounter the Other without projecting
ourselves onto it. “La ilusión monarca” becomes instead an exploration of
the creative power of metaphor and “a meditation on pure multiplicity,” as
Serres defines his own project in Genesis (1982),164 a book that becomes a
significant node in the textual and tropological network that Cohen’s text
creates. Although metaphor’s rendering of an unfamiliar thing in terms of
a more familiar thing inevitably limits and distorts the knowledge gained,
Cohen’s narrative also redeems metaphor for the insight it affords into the
processes of transformation and recombination that govern the literary text
as much as the natural physical world. If an understanding of these processes leads to greater knowledge of the human condition and our place in the
universe, metaphor should not always provoke epistemological skepticism.
In this manner, Cohen departs significantly from the Nietzsche-inspired
suspicion, prevalent in postmodern theory and criticism, that what we
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take as “truth” is nothing but “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,
anthropomorphisms.”165
Anthropomorphic analogies and metaphors, far from being wholly discredited as tools that are far too blunt to produce genuine knowledge, play
a crucial role in establishing the indivisibility of man and nature, one of the
central tenets of Romanticism. Jules Michelet’s The Sea (1861) exemplifies
the Romantic principle of analogy – linking the particular with the general,
the individual with the nation, the physical and the moral – that also underpins much of Cohen’s work. Michelet’s sea, like Cohen’s, is a “majestic and
indifferent” entity:166 “If we have need of it, it has no need of us. It can do admirably without man.”167 We feel a heightened sense of our own transience,
confronted with its immortal and unchangeable existence, feeling ourselves
to be an “ephemeral apparition” in comparison to “the grand immutable powers of Nature.”168 And yet the sea shares our nature – “Ocean breathes as we
do – in harmony with our internal movement” – and, in reminding us of our
mortality, it points us to the divine spirit that animates all creation: “it compels us to count incessantly with it, to compute the days and hours, to look up
to Heaven.”169 For Michelet, a “grand, sympathetic, and pregnant dialogue”
unites all of creation with itself and with its Creator, but the harmony and
fertility that characterize the world result not from agreement but from a “gigantic struggle,” a constant tension between Life and “its sister, Death,” and
between forces of preservation and destruction at every level of existence.170
The sea in “La ilusión monarca” pullulates and pulsates to the rhythm of
Michelet’s, according to the same principle of conflict and disorder: “Todo
está ahí, esforzándose, luchando, ocupado, todo se mezcla, se enfrenta, se
plagia, devora” (everything is there, striving, fighting, busy, everything mixes, clashes, copies, devours).171 The sea’s “energía criminal” (criminal energy)
litters the shore with marooned jellyfish each day; many more deaths and
decompositions are signalled only by “los olores que exhala” (the smells it
gives off).172 If the sea is anthropomorphized, it is to show its commonality
with man: both are systems that ingest and expel, create and destroy, protect
and lay waste, give birth and die. Sergio, engulfed in the sea’s waves, becomes
part of this cycle as the half-digested sardine head he vomits becomes food
for a passing shoal of sardines. As Edward K. Kaplan notes, “Michelet’s
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relentless anthropomorphism is far from being a sheer stylistic quirk; rather
it points to the divine impulse shared by humanity and nature.”173 Likewise,
Cohen’s use of analogy emphasizes the structural similarity of all living
things. The difference, of course, is that Cohen does not posit a divine originator who breathes life into his creation, but locates life in the push and
pull of forces that, if blindly functioning, are nevertheless able to create new
forms out of disorder and conflict.
For Michelet, as Serres observes, the sea is the “prebiotic soup,” “the
matter from which all other material things originated.”174 In his exploration
of how matter is generated or animated, Michelet makes imaginative use of
a number of different theories of mechanics circulating at the time; his most
original contribution to the theme, in Serres’s view, stems from his use of
the principles of thermodynamic circulation.175 Serres notes the precision
with which Michelet uses the vocabulary of “a boiler, a source, and a steam
engine” to represent circulation in the sea, the mixing of the “soup” from
which all matter emerges.176 As he explains, “there can be no mixture without a movement to disperse the solute through the solvent. […] There must
be fire to prepare the soup, and a pot to prepare it in, and it has to boil.”177
Cohen uses a similar image in “La ilusión monarca” of the soup that mixes as
it is heated; his sea is also a model of turbulence and disorder that confounds
any attempt to move through it in a straight line, and indeed rids Sergio of
all sense of direction or goal, and all desire to escape. Everything in the sea
“se intercambia y disuelve” (exchanges and dissolves) in a continual process
of transformation.178
When in one of many descriptions of the sea, Cohen’s narrator draws our
attention to “esta vaga claridad a lo Turner” (this hazy Turneresque light),179
the direct comparison seems almost redundant. The text repeatedly returns
to the shifting hues and forms of the sea and sky, the shimmering play of
light on surging waves, in ways that strongly evoke Turner’s seascapes. For
Serres, Turner’s art marks the transition “from simple machines to steam
engines, from mechanics to thermodynamics,” showing the transforming
power of fire to change the form of matter and the fundamental roles of
chance and disorder, dramatizing hot and cold matter in fusion: “On the
one hand clouds of ice, on the other clouds of incandescence.”180 From the
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precise drawing of forms and forces, Turner takes us towards a different
understanding of matter in flux, which forms “aleatory clouds” and in which
“the stochastic is essential”: “The instant is not statically immobilized, fixed
like a mast; it is an unforeseen state, hazardous, suspended, drowned, melted in duration, dissolved.”181 For this reason, Serres avers, “Turner is not a
pre-impressionist. He is a realist, a proper realist.”182 Cohen’s descriptions
of the sea are imbued with a similar sensitivity to matter in constant movement. His sea, which “a cada instante se pulveriza en violencias” (at every
instant atomizes itself in acts of violence),183 also enters into a continual play
of heat and light with the sky in descriptive passages that could easily refer
to a Turner painting. It rains, and the horizon is hidden by clouds of vapour;
“repentinos bultos de carbón revientan, lentos, dejando escapar hilos espermáticos, floraciones de nata y de yogur, lirios ardientes donde el sol hace
sentir su fuerza” (sudden masses of coal burst, slowly, allowing the escape of
spermatic threads, flowerings of cream and yoghurt, burning lilies where the
sun makes its force felt).184
Nietzsche’s Dionysian sea, another precursor to Cohen’s, also draws inspiration from the dynamics of difference and sameness at play in entropy, as
expressed in various versions of the two laws of thermodynamics formulated
by Rudolf Clausius (1850) and others. In a fragment published in The Will
to Power, Nietzsche finds in the sea a metaphor for the world itself, a “monster of energy,” “a sea of forces flowing and rushing together.”185 Aligning
his description with the first law of thermodynamics, which states that the
energy within a system may change form but remains constant, Nietzsche
describes a world “that does not expend itself but only transforms itself.”
Strictly finite in extension, it is nevertheless full of contradictions, opposing
forces and turbulence, “eternally changing, eternally flooding back […] with
an ebb and a flood of its forms.” It is noteworthy, however, that Nietzsche
also departs significantly from mid-nineteenth-century scientific principles
– and from their articulation in much twentieth-century literature – by insisting on what we would now identify as emergent phenomena in complex
systems. Nietzsche’s sense of nature “striving toward the most complex,” as
simple forms, through turbulence, give rise to more complex ones before
dissolving again into simpler ones, together with his vision of the sea’s forces
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flowing “out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most
turbulent, most self-contradictory,” evoke the dynamics of emergence, which
would initially seem to defy laws of entropy. Life-affirming creativity, not the
heat-death of entropy, marks Nietzsche’s “Dionysian world of the eternally
self-creating, the eternally self-destroying.”186
The “blissful ecstasy” of the Dionysiac, which breaks down the “principium individuationis,” results in a dissolution of subjectivity that Nietzsche
compares to the experience of intoxication and brings humans together in a
“mysterious primordial unity.”187 This sense of oneness works to “annihilate,
redeem and release” the individual,188 much as it does in Cohen’s fiction.
When Sergio in “La ilusión monarca” finally swims out to sea, the intensely
sensorial experience of his body’s immersion in water teeming with life initially leads him to lose a sense of his self. He feels that “puede que no sea él
quien nada” (it may not be him who is swimming),189 and the immensity and
the sameness of the sea surrounding him has a decentring effect in which his
outer limbs seem disconnected from his body and his body itself fragmented
and dispersed. A lexicon of exchange, dissolution, transformation, disintegration, and recombination predominates, as – like an endlessly turning
kaleidoscope – narrative figures trace the dissolving of one transient form
into another. In the sea Sergio both loses himself and finds himself in a way
that strongly evokes the effect of Dionysian art for Nietzsche.
Dionysian art convinces us of the eternal creativity of nature, which endures despite all changes in appearance and all destruction. In Nietzsche’s
words,
For brief moments we are truly the primordial being itself and
we feel its unbounded greed and lust for being; the struggle,
the agony, the destruction of appearances, all this now seems
to us to be necessary, given the uncountable excess of forms of
existence thrusting and pushing themselves into life, given the
exuberant fertility of the world-Will; we are pierced by the furious sting of these pains at the very moment when, as it were, we
become one with the immeasurable, primordial delight in existence and receive an intimation, in Dionysiac ecstasy, that this
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delight is indestructible and eternal. Despite fear and pity, we
are happily alive, not as individuals, but as the one living being,
with whose procreative lust we have become one.190
This vision thoroughly permeates Cohen’s description of Sergio’s experience
at sea, in which he senses both the “eternal lust and delight” and the “terrors”
of existence painted by Nietzsche and feels the simultaneous pain and pleasure of discovering himself to be caught up in a conflict and a creativity that
extends far beyond him, lost in a centreless, directionless, pulsating mass
of energy. The sea returns Sergio to the shore a changed man. The prison
seems little more than a theatre set to him now, and the only question of
significance is “cómo sumergirse mejor en el mundo cuando salga, cuál la
fácil brazada, estar de veras donde esté; no qué hacer, no adónde llegar, sino
cómo seguir estando” (how to submerge himself better in the world when he
gets out, which is the easy stroke, how to really be where one is; not what to
do, not where to arrive, but how to continue being).191 The destruction of the
individual, for Cohen as for Nietzsche, leads paradoxically to a greater sense
of one’s place in the world and of one’s connections with others. A cynical
loner prior to his experience in the sea, Sergio now seeks out community to
communicate what has happened to him.
The play of waves and forces in Nietzsche’s Dionysian world allows us to
glimpse its nature as “at the same time one and many.”192 A similar use of the
analogy of the turbulent sea to theorize multiplicity connects the work of
Nietzsche with Serres, and both of these with Cohen. Turning to a different
analogy from the history of art, Cohen describes how “El mar se desmenuza
en cien mil puntos de Seurat” (the sea breaks down into a hundred thousand
of Seurat’s dots):193 like Seurat’s pointillist works, the unity of the sea is an
illusion that hides a multiplicity. The sea might appear uniform, cohesive,
and enduring, but it is in fact “una ilusión de continuidad” (an illusion of
continuity): “el mar no es una superficie ni está hecho de una pieza” (the sea
is not a surface, nor it is made of one piece).194 As he reflects elsewhere,
En la forma que tiene de aparecérsenos, la realidad nos engaña.
Los sentidos nos presentan una multiplicidad exorbitante que
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impide ver la unidad de todo lo real, o bien dan a las apariencias
una solidez duradera de la que la realidad carece.195
In the form in which it appears to us, reality deceives us. Our
senses present us with an exorbitant multiplicity that prevents
us from seeing the unity of all reality, or alternatively they give
appearances a lasting solidity that reality does not possess.
Serres’s Genesis also draws on the sea to explore multiplicity, finding in turbulence a way of thinking the multiple without reducing it to the unitary.
Turbulence is “an intermediary state, and also an aggregate mix,” bringing
together order and disorder, and mixing or associating the one and the
multiple by putting into play both a “systematic gathering together” (the
unitary) and a “distribution” (the multiple).196 Turbulence gives us a vision
of the world that is not governed by laws, uniformity, and structures but by
intermittence, mixture, and noise:
The world is empty here and full there, sometimes being and
sometimes nothingness, here order, there chaotic, here occupied, there lacunary, sporadic, and intermittent, as a whole, here
strongly foreseeable, there underdetermined, here temporal and
there meteorological – here, I mean, predictable or reversible
and there an estimate and aleatory, here universe, there diverse,
here unitary and there multiplicity, all in all when all’s said and
done a multiplicity. The cosmos is not a structure, it is a pure
multiplicity of ordered multiplicities and pure multiplicities.197
Both Serres and Cohen attempt in this way to think about multiplicity from
perspectives that do not start or end with postmodern pluralism and to
understand chaos and indeterminacy in ways that do not inevitably lead to
postmodern skepticism.
The positive charge acquired by entropy and multiplicity as forces of
creativity in Cohen – following Nietzsche and Serres – is set into relief if
we examine the rather different representation of these in another node in
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this network of tropologies, Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams
(1918). In Adams’s presentation of the dialectic of unity and multiplicity,
multiplicity is always associated negatively with chaos and disorder; he traces “a movement from American unity of purpose to self-serving multiplicity”
and predicts “a world torn apart, grinding down to entropic inertia.”198 Tony
Tanner notes the recurrence of sea imagery in The Education, evoking in turn
the violence of war, a fear of the void and darkness, and a sense of drifting
and purposelessness.199 Like hundreds of thousands of young men, Henry
Adams is cast into “the surf of a wild ocean” to be beaten about by “the
waves of war”;200 a different sort of confusion is generated later in politics,
in which “All parties were mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal
slack-water.”201
Philipp Schweighauser, in his comparison of the treatment of unity and
multiplicity in the work of Adams and Serres, observes that the sea is one
of a number of tropes shared between them.202 However, if in Adams the
turbulence of the sea becomes a metaphor for the chaos of war, in Serres it
acquires much more positive connotations: it is the source of noise and ultimately of life itself. Schweighauser focusses on the crucial difference in their
representation of Venus/Aphrodite. Adams associates Venus with unity
and harmony; for Serres, on the other hand (in company with Lucretius),
Aphrodite is “born of this chaotic sea, this nautical chaos, the noise.”203 If
disorder is the universal principle that gives rise to newness, for Serres “it is
necessary to rethink the world not in terms of its laws and its regularities,
but rather in terms of perturbations and turbulences, in order to bring out
its multiple forms, uneven structures, and fluctuating organizations.”204
The sea-as-metaphor in Cohen’s work sets off an expanding series of
vibrations in those tropes and texts that are to be found in t(r)opological
proximity to it. Metaphors may unite two different fields of reference, but
they also resonate across a plane of immanence in which trope and referent
are not distinguished in a hierarchical fashion but form part of a dense, rhizomatic network. This, then, becomes a way of thinking about multiplicity
that does not posit relations of “influence” in literature in linear or directly causal terms, or understand the relationship of literature and the rest
of the world as one of reference, but brings together an aggregate of texts,
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perceptions (of texts and of reality), and experiences (of texts and of reality)
in such a way that each encounters the others in an intermittent, turbulent
manner, thereby remaining simultaneously multiple and part of a larger system in which forms constantly evolve.
Cohen’s conception of the role of metaphor in articulating that multiplicity contrasts directly with its traditional function in Western metaphysics. If, as Heidegger reminds us, “The idea of ‘transposing’ and of metaphor
is based upon the distinguishing, if not complete separation, of the sensible
and the nonsensible as two realms that subsist on their own,”205 this opens
the door for a Platonic mistrust of the changeable world of the senses in
favour of the unchanging world of Ideas. Cohen’s immanent vision does not
allow us to distinguish so easily between the sensible and the nonsensible;
moreover, the true nature of the world, visible and invisible, becomes one of
transformation: there is nothing behind its changes in appearance.
Nietzsche’s definition of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms”206 is often cited to demonstrate the failure of
man’s quest for knowledge. Yet in Nietzsche, man’s “fundamental human
drive” to form metaphors207 is, as Jos de Mul argues, “nothing less than a
metaphor for nature’s constant metaphorical transformation of itself,” without which “Being itself would not be able to exist.”208 At the service of the
artist, metaphor continually remakes the world, unfixing rigid concepts.209
Nietzsche’s own radical and contradictory use of metaphor resists all attempts to fix a single interpretation of his work. Likewise, Cohen’s own
analogies and intertextual references create a shifting, mobile network in
which metaphors such as entropy often change in use from one narrative to
another as they are brought into new discursive combinations.
“La ilusión monarca” does not tell a tale of the irresistible lure of anthropomorphism and our doomed quest for meaning in a senseless or unfathomable universe. We are not so caught up in language that we cannot
experience that radical otherness that compels us to clutch at metaphors
in the first place. Metaphors do not distort; they transform. They do not
reduce meaning but set up a series of vibrations that produce new and often
unpredictable patternings and permutations. This is what Cohen refers to
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as the transformative power of resonance, which is the proper subject of enquiry of his “realismo inseguro.”210
As we have seen, entropy emerges in Cohen’s work as a privileged metaphor for literary creativity, and returning once more to Serres’s essay on
Michelet may throw some light on this choice. Underlying the many different
theories and models Michelet draws upon – from geometry, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on – Serres identifies two “completely stable structural
analogies.”211 These are reservoirs (points of condensation and concentration)
and circulation. This is tantamount, as Serres explains, to saying “a set of
elements plus operations upon these elements”; in defining the object of the
text in this way, however, he is not “defining a structure” but “defining structure itself; for the definition of structure is indeed a set of elements provided
with operations.”212 Serres shows that asking questions about reservoirs and
circulation such as “What is in the reservoir?” and “How do the elements
circulate?” will eventually “reconstruct the entire set of interpretative organons formed in the nineteenth century.”213
And this, Serres suggests, is the reason that his analysis of Michelet’s
text cannot be considered to have explicated it in any way:
there can no longer be any question of explicating Michelet by
any one or other of these interpretative organons, or by the sum
total of them, since the most general conditions for the formation of these very organons are explained clearly and distinctly
in the book The Sea itself. All I can do is apply these same organons to one another. […] The object of explanation explains in
turn the set of methods that were to explicate it.214
The critic cannot explicate the text because “the strategy of criticism is
located in the object of criticism,” and this, Serres insists, is not a unique
characteristic of Michelet’s text but fully generalizable: “The text is its own
criticism, its own explication, its own application.”215 Any transcendent approach to criticism is therefore redundant.
Serres renders plausible the idea that entropy and thermodynamics
might be privileged tropes for literary construction, as they do not represent
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or explain a particular structure so much as define structure itself: the very
laws that govern the condensation and circulation of elements within a text.
Cohen’s narratives suggest a very similar strategy of criticism: metaphors
of entropy, dissipative structures, resonance, and turbulence in El fin de lo
mismo lead us to ask how these texts represent and stage an encounter with
difference, how they imagine and perform relations between texts, and between texts and the world, and how they attempt to conceive multiplicity.
These are the metaphors that enable Cohen, like Nietzsche, to theorize a
world that “lives on itself: its excrements are its food”216 as a picture of art,
which participates in the same, endlessly self-producing, cycle: “The world as
a work of art that gives birth to itself.”217 They also allow him to carve out an
alternative path that diverges from contemporary society’s definition of (socioeconomic) progress, as well as from postmodernism’s inability to theorize
the new.
In the intricate association of creativity and destruction, energy and disorder in the narratives of El fin de lo mismo, we can detect further echoes of
Ballard’s work, especially in the erotic intensity with which he treats the car
crash in The Atrocity Exhibition and the later Crash (1973), which becomes a
site of sexual liberation and energy as well as trauma and violence. Among
the many “ecos ballardianos” (Ballardian echoes) that Jorge Bracamonte
perceptively observes in Cohen’s novels is a shared recourse to science and
technology as a source of metaphors.218 However, Bracamonte’s comparative
study of the two authors does not touch on what I consider to be crucial
differences in the formation of such metaphors. Cohen’s much greater reliance on the physics of chaos and complexity allows him to resignify the relationship between disorder and creativity in more unambiguously positive
terms and to relocate these dynamics within the natural world rather than
emphasizing, as Ballard does, the cruelty of man-made technologies. The
trauma and alienation that mark the violent fusion of human bodies and
urban environment in Ballard are reversed in Cohen’s immanent vision, one
in which organic and inorganic matter, conscious and unconscious energies,
are bound together according to natural laws, in which chaos and turbulence
are not the exception but the rule.
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Julián Jiménez Heffernan argues that the repeated metafictional
references to entropy and metaphor in The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrate
Pynchon’s awareness of the fact that “entropy is not simply a trope, but a
metatrope, for it harbors a reference to the tropological gesture par excellence: transformation, transference, metalepsis.”219 However, Pynchon’s
treatment of metaphor, and of the metaphor of entropy, remains much
more ambivalent than Cohen’s. Peter Freese, among other critics, points
to the shift in Pynchon’s understanding of entropy that is evident in the
passage from “Entropy” to The Crying of Lot 49, in which Pynchon places
the thermodynamical version of entropy as heat death in tension with the
use of entropy in information theory to describe the loss and distortion of
information in communication (“noise”). In this context, Freese asserts that
the Tristero, a secret communication system discovered by Oedipa, “should
be understood as a promising sign of renewal and reordering.”220 Similarly,
Thomas Schaub claims that Pynchon’s introduction of the information-theory version of entropy allows him to suggest that “Oedipa’s sorting activities may counter the forces of disorganization and death.”221 Yet The Crying
of Lot 49 leaves crucially undecidable the question of whether metaphors
aid perception or distort it, whether they help us make sense of the world
and connect ourselves to it or feed a dangerous paranoid obsession with
plots and conspiracies: the “act of metaphor” is both “a thrust at truth and
a lie.”222 Freese may be right in suggesting that Pynchon’s novel itself, with
its dense weavings of plot and metaphor, counters entropy’s disorderings as
it “constitutes the negentropy activity that imaginative humans might pit
against the running-down of their universe,”223 but this promise of meaning
is only promoted in the most uncertain of ways within the text itself. Both
Pynchon and Cohen create texts that exploit the wealth of the rhizomatic
relationships through which metaphor produces endlessly varied and infinitely mutating meanings. However, while Pynchon, as Heffernan observes,
“is constantly alerting us to the slipperiness of figurative diction,”224 Cohen’s
choice to embed his treatment of metaphor within the dynamics of chaos
and the metaphysics of multiplicity renders his work much less equivocal in
its celebration of the creative power of metaphor.
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